


time to run

by rappaccini



Series: ut malum pluvia [4]
Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Abuse, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Character Study, Complicated Relationships, F/F, F/M, M/M, Multi, Pseudo-Incest, Trauma, characterizing the sparrows based on basically zero canon material so they're basically ocs
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-11
Updated: 2020-09-17
Packaged: 2021-03-06 19:40:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 4
Words: 49,111
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26474311
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rappaccini/pseuds/rappaccini
Summary: The Hargreeves siblings, following their breakout from Hotel Oblivion, are on the run. Reginald Hargreeves enlists his second family, the Sparrow Academy, to hunt them down.(Or, I don't care if there'll be a Season 4 and what it'll look like. There is no canon and I'm totally okay with that.)
Relationships: Allison Hargreeves/Luther Hargreeves, Ben Hargreeves/Klaus Hargreeves, Diego Hargreeves/Klaus Hargreeves, Number Five | The Boy/Vanya Hargreeves, The Hargreeves & Lila Pitts, The Hargreeves Family, The Sparrow Academy & Lila Pitts, The Sparrow Academy & The Umbrella Academy, The Sparrow Academy (Umbrella Academy) - Relationship, Vanya Hargreeves/Carla Hargreeves
Series: ut malum pluvia [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1857544
Comments: 92
Kudos: 81





	1. on a collision course

**Author's Note:**

  * For [WolfSpider](https://archiveofourown.org/users/WolfSpider/gifts).



In the depths of the Nordic wilderness, so high and so far north that even as springtime creeps slowly into the mountains, their sharp slopes still refuse to give up their snow, the Sparrows are waiting. 

They are waiting for the phone call that they are sure is to come any hour now, any day now, any week now, any month now, any year now. 

They are waiting for their father, who they have never met, but have been fed a too-sugary diet of glowing stories about over the course of their life by their cubic robotic mother. 

They are waiting for their siblings, who they have been told about for their entire lives, whose shoes they are to step into if something were to happen, if they were to all die horrifically on some awful mission-gone-wrong.

They are waiting for one sibling in particular, for the one last piece to complete their set, who they have been promised for years and years.

They are waiting for their lives to begin. 

They are also waiting for their deaths, as all people are, and they are quite aware of it, as most people are not. They are not aware that they will be coming so soon, or so horribly.

While Sir Reginald presided over every tiny aspect of his first family’s lives, he was quite content to let his robotic wife handle the ins and outs of raising the Sparrows, building around himself and his absence an air of distant mystique that would ensure devotion, as gods might build their religions. 

(A small aside, about the Sparrow Academy: they are prone to the same sort of magical thinking that possesses children raised in isolation. In their case, all the magic belongs to their father.)

In both cases, he had discovered that the intended results of his caretaking styles had backfired. The Umbrella Academy are deeply individualistic, going so far as to demand names of their own (and in one timeline, to break up entirely), in spite of his hopes that his continued influence would stamp out any selfish urges. The Sparrow Academy, in contrast, are highly collectivist; all but one had spurned the idea of gaining a name of one’s own, and they had never once parted from one another in their twenty-nine years together. 

(A small aside, about the Sparrow Academy: they are prone to sharing clothes, sharing dreams, sharing beds, sharing thoughts.)

Number One, Number Two, Number Three, Number Four, Carla and Number Six are a well-oiled machine. They are ferociously loyal and endlessly patient, eager to await the ringing of the radio phone in their dull, Spartan base. When it does, they know, their destiny will arrive. 

(A small aside, about the Sparrow Academy: they have known their entire lives that the machine is incomplete.)

They fill their days, of which there are many, carefully. They go hunting in the valleys, trapping or else running down animals great and small themselves. They track animals, or the few skiers who pass through the area, or each other. They look at the stars and make up stories about which one would come down to earth in the form of their father. They climb the mountains, often holding races to see who can reach the summit fastest.

(A small aside, about the Sparrow Academy: at first it had always, always been Two who had won, but as One learned that his power was far more than the strength it had initially appeared to be, he had begun to eclipse her hold on the imaginary prize; in fact, it is a strongly-held belief between Three and Six that midair had been the site of the development of that indescribable fondness that punctuates so many of the Hargreeves children’s relationships with one another.)

All is done, of course, in accordance with a strict schedule the father they had never met had given them, training every morning and studying every afternoon, before being turned loose to do as they pleased in the evening. 

(A small aside, about the Sparrow Academy: instead of being raised by their father, or raised by wolves, they are raised by the television. They'd have been safest with the wolves.)

It is on one pleasant evening, not quite halfway into April, that the time finally comes.

(A small aside, about the Sparrow Academy: Sunset. 5:43pm. Moon is waxing crescent. Dinner is rabbit stew, wild herbs and boiled water.)

Rather than watching the bright Technicolor portal to the outside world, as they usually do, the Sparrows are in the process of dying One’s hair a rich wheat-blond, an indulgence that is rather uncharacteristic of him, but one he is nonetheless quite serious about, because he wants to match with Two. They’ve accomplished it perfectly, and are admiring their handiwork, tittering with pleasure at the way it catches the light of the dim bulb hanging from the ceiling, when the blare of the phone echoes down the concrete halls of their home.

(A small aside, about the Sparrow Academy: They have never heard a telephone ring in person before. It is the second-most terrible sound they will ever hear.)

They freeze, staring off at the phone, where it sits, propping up a thin, dusty spiderweb. 

The tiny little red light attached to the phone is flashing on, off, on, off, on, off.

It’s like they’re in a dream, in one of the vivid ones they’ve shared for twenty-five years, the ones in which they rehearse their arrival into the world over and over and over again.

(A small aside, about the Sparrow Academy: They are never alone, not even in sleep.)

But this is not a dream, they realize, looking to Carla, who shakes her head helplessly. 

This is real. This is _real._

Two picks up the phone, and hands it unquestioningly to One, who lifts it shakily to his mouth and whispers, “Hello?”

It is their father. His voice is not warm and wise and golden, as they had imagined it to be. It is cold and sharp and crackling with impatience.

But it is their father’s voice, and their mission has arrived at last. 

“Hello, Sir,” he says. 

Despite their excellent instincts, the Sparrows cannot resist chirping.

“Hang up!” urges Three. “Make him call us again! I want to see him do it again!”

“Has it happened?” asks Four. “Are they dead?”

“Is it our turn now?” presses Six.

Two shushes them severely, and they fall silent in an instant, like all small birds do at the sound of a sudden wind. 

Their brother does not answer. He listens calmly, and hangs up the phone.

“They are not,” he replies, to a chorus of grumbles. 

“Then what do we need to do?” asks Carla, who has always been the most astute of the six. 

One speaks those three golden words that had undone all of the Hargreeves children, Umbrella or Sparrow: “Father needs us.”

They leave immediately.

(A small aside, about the Sparrow Academy: They do not deserve to die in the way that they will. Regardless, they will.)

* * *

A blizzard of glass blasts towards them, and the Academy has only half a second to respond.

Vanya and Five go diving through the swinging door, into the kitchen, while the rest of their siblings huddle behind Luther, who turns on his heels to bear the full weight of the attack on his back. The glass drips off his back like rain, and he turns, slowly, realizing that they are no longer alone in the restaurant.

Six shapes are flying, no, _floating,_ in through the ragged gap in the window, landing elegantly on their feet. There are four women and two men, all clad in tight uniforms, of a similar make to Umbrella Academy’s, but each distinct from the one beside it, and all in a strange shade of coral-red, as opposed to the Academy’s black. All are wearing domino masks. They’re _superheroes,_ the Hargreeves siblings realize.

Behind them, the welcoming bell over the door jingles mockingly. 

There’s a moment of absolute silence, of absolute stillness.

The Sparrows are staring at their long-lost siblings, the ones they’d only seen photos and magazine articles and news footage of, drinking in the sight of them in the flesh. They’ve never known them, and never will, and so they stare, intensely, at the six siblings they are tasked with killing, trying to memorize every detail of them while they are all still alive.

They are also, of course, sizing them up, as a pack of wolves might size up a herd of caribou.

The Umbrellas are shocked, for two reasons.

The first, and far more obvious, being the existence of other superheroes.

The second is far more complicated, but vital to understand, so it will be broken down as such: Griddy’s Doughnuts has always been a special, sacred place for them, an oasis of normalcy and safety away from home that they could truly be _themselves_ in during a time when being oneself among witnesses was tantamount to a fat lamb handing a knife to a starving butcher. 

Seeing it all shatter in front of them is akin to… well, indulge in a quick fantasy, if you will.

Picture this: You have had a difficult childhood, one defined by long stretches of severe loneliness and anxiety, and you’ve only ever made one true friend in those golden days of youth. That true friend is someone you drift apart from, naturally, as you grow up. But now, you’ve moved back to the city of your childhood, have run into that dear old friend, and finally found the time to go out to dinner together. It is wonderful, and at its conclusion, over dessert, you finally vow to rekindle your friendship. And then, you watch that dear old friend get shot in the back of the head right before they bring that last little forkful of tiramisu to their mouth, and you feel their blood spray all over your face, and you realize that they had only ever been shot because the person holding the gun had no idea who this person was to you, and had been aiming for you the entire time, and had thought that shooting through your friend was the easiest way to get to you. 

You get it now.

So. On with the bloodletting.

None can say who started it, not the shocked passer-by who’d been unfortunate enough to have been passing Griddy’s Doughnuts one second before the window had been shattered, nor the police who will arrive in two minutes’ time, nor the news van that will arrive in ten minutes’ time, nor any of the Hargreeves siblings themselves. 

Both sides had their reasons, of course. 

The Sparrows had their mission. They had their grand debut, and their new sister, and their father’s love to think about. They had already come to believe that the stage on which their father shone his love and affection only had a limited number of spaces in the spotlight available. They had already each individually taken a look at the six of their targets, and quietly stopped thinking of them as people, and once one stops thinking of one’s opponents as people, it becomes quite easy to violently obliterate them in a shower of gore, and violence is all that Hargreeves children are taught.

The Umbrellas had their survival. They had the lives they had yet to live, and their siblings, and their freedom from their father's love to think about. They had already come to believe that the stage on which their father shone his love and affection was deeply unfair, as the spotlight didn't even work that well anyway, and their performances were never enough to attract it. They had already endured lifetimes of abuse and manipulation, which had fine-tuned each and every one of them to view every stranger as a source of potential danger, and once one views every stranger as a source of potential danger, it becomes quite easy to assume that they will attack in a way that can only be countered by violence, and violence is all that Hargreeves children are taught. 

We will agree to compromise, and assume that both halves of the Hargreeves family flew into action at the exact same second. It's easier that way, and though it may not be the truth, it is the closest anyone will ever get to it. 

That Luther threw a fist at the blond, muscular man he does not know is called Number One at the same instance that Number One sunk into the tile, so he might leap up at Luther’s legs from below.

That Diego flings a knife at the tall, svelte woman he does not know is called Number Two at the same instance that her golden hair begins to float about her as though she were underwater, and she tears a table from where it’s been bolted into the foundation, sending it skidding across the restaurant at Diego, who is hating himself for not remembering that he doesn’t exactly have great depth perception when he’s operating with fifty percent of his vision.

That Allison opened her mouth at the thin, severe-looking woman with large dark glasses that she does not know is called Number Three at the same instance that she raises her arms, dissolving into a flock of sharp corvids, flinging themselves at her in one fluid motion, and recovering strongly when Allison snatches one out of the air, throwing it to the ground, and crunching it beneath her heavy boot.

That Klaus tosses a pot of boiling coffee at the head of the thin, sticklike woman he does not know is called Number Four at the same instance that her eyes blaze blue-white, and emit a beam of energy hot enough to instantly vaporize the steaming liquid hurtling towards her face, and the walls behind it. 

That Ben kicks the jelly-headed man he does not know is called Number Six square in the chest at the same moment that the man channels his power, and sends the blast barreling right back at his adversary, ramming invisibly right into Ben’s chest and sending him sailing across the floor.

None can say for certain who started it, only that it started, and that Griddy’s is a goner.

Vanya, huddled in the kitchen beneath a stainless-steel countertop beside Five, calls out, “What do we do? What do we _do?”_

Five, who is too busy trying to lean out the doorway to get a look at what’s going on, at an angle that he hopes is close enough to the ground to not encourage any laser-style decapitations, chooses not to respond to her.

In front of him, Klaus squawks in panic, diving for the floor. When he hits it, the tile knocks a sound from his gut that sounds a bit like the bleat of a goat.

Just outside, there’s a rubbery screech, and the earsplitting wail of a police siren.

Everyone pauses. The cops have arrived. 

_Great_ , Diego thinks sourly. _Even more people who are out to get us._

“Everyone freeze!”

Diego’s jaw drops.

It’s Eudora.

It’s _Eudora,_ staring him down through her sights, glaring at him ferociously. It’s Eudora, and she’s alive, and she has never met him before, and she has no idea how well he knows her. She has lived an entire life, and he has had no part in it, and because he has had no part in it, she has an entire life ahead of her.

Diego feels like he’s the one taking the bullet to the chest this time.

Their attackers turn, to fix their attention on the police, but they aren’t charging; they’re simply all standing in place, staring, one to the next, and then the blond man steps forward, throwing up his hands. They all seem a little amused, but in a gawkish way, like they've never seen a police officer in person before. 

Someone’s tugging on Diego’s sleeve; it’s Ben, hauling him back to where the others are huddled in the back of the diner, to where Five is gathering the family to him. 

“Who the hell are _these_ guys?” Diego hisses.

“Who cares?” snaps Vanya, staring at the walls, crumpling over like bright pink paper. “We are _not_ fighting in Griddy’s.”

“Hate to break it to you,” hisses Diego, “But we already did.”

 _“They_ started it!”

“Klaus, shut up and grab onto me!” Five commands.

He obeys.

Five clenches his fists, grits his teeth, and the air ripples around them, crackling with electricity.

A shadow scrapes across the tiled floor, and its owner comes rushing around the corner. 

It’s the skinny woman, the one with the blazing eyes, that are already pulsing and humming with energy. A vein pops in her sallow neck, and a burning beam leaps from her eyes, searing a bright path through the kitchen.

They’re gone by the time it reaches them, but it keeps burning, turning the tile where they'd been standing not a second earlier into a puddle of molten linoleum.

* * *

There’s a process to escaping a nationwide manhunt. The members of the Umbrella Academy, being of course, six ex-vigilantes and one woman who’d been raised with six ex-vigilantes, are quite familiar with it; their father had trained them in these very methods, so they might be able to better track down runaway criminals.

Now, being runaway criminals, they’ve put it to use. 

Once they’d escaped their attackers, their first concern became changing the way they look: seven people in superhero uniforms are sure to stand out, which is the opposite of what they need. 

This was accomplished in Five’s raid of the local Gimbel Brothers’ Department Store, in which he blinked in, snatched two armfuls of clothes off of several different racks, and stumbled back through a rip in space into the disused university classroom Five had jumped them to. And, in his procurement of an armful of hair dyes he’d snatched from a drugstore without much thought.

Said dyes are currently destroying the sink of the motel room Allison had procured for them, just beyond the city limits, which they reached with the car that Diego had hotwired for them. They’re a few hours into their fugitivehood, and to be perfectly honest, she’d expected it to involve a lot more running than sitting around and waiting. She gets why they're not making a mad dash for it; after all, they need a plan, they need a destination, and they need to look different enough from the wanted posters to at least pass as someone else from a distance.

But she’s kind of grateful, for the monotony of sitting in a motel room, on a saggy mattress, twiddling her thumbs while she waits for the rest of her family to sort themselves out. It’s a childish thought, that inside the four wallpapered walls of the motel, there exists a sort of bubble of safety, and no one can pop it. But it’s nice, so she decides to indulge it. It's easier, to pretend that they're not on the run from anyone and everyone, that her daughter isn't nonexistent and that she doesn't know what to do with that pain, that they're just a group of ordinary siblings, who are stopping by here before they go off on some perfectly boring vacation.

She listens for a moment, to the jabbering of her brothers inside the bathroom. Klaus and Luther are talking about growing beards, and Ben has shaved his mediocre facial hair, a decision that everyone is very bad at pretending they aren’t pleased with. Now, he and Diego are fighting over who gets to use the razor, and Five is backseat driving from where he’s perched on the edge of the bathtub, with his hair stained black (she notes, annoyedly, that he has refused to change from his mission uniform, and wonders if it’s to do with his anxiety about the disparity in his many simultaneous ages). It’s a harmless kind of chaos, one that won’t lead to any deaths or maimings, the kind of chaos she thinks ordinary families indulge in.

Vanya’s out of the bathroom by now, her hair freshly dyed and still dripping, the metallic tang of bleach clinging to her and burning her nose. Seeing her with pale, near-white hair unsettles Allison. It’s as it was months ago, when she’d brought the moon down on their heads, when she’d brought the Commission crashing down. It’s more blonde than it is silver, bleached by dye rather than raw power, and it’s a look that suits her quite well, but it still makes Allison’s skin crawl just a bit. 

Vanya stares in the hall mirror at the long, flowing orange skirt Allison has persuaded her into wearing. She looks at it like it’s going to come to life and start gnawing on her waist. 

“Vanya, it looks good,” Allison tries, “See, it’s _flouncy.”_

“Flouncy,” she repeats flatly, twisting experimentally and watching the hem of the skirt shift below her knees.

“Yes, flouncy.”

“But it’s not _me.”_

“That’s the point! The idea is to look as little like yourself as possible. See, I never dress like a grandma, but _look.”_

Vanya stares at Allison’s loose jeans, dull grayish-purple sweater and thrift store trenchcoat. _“I_ dress like that.”

Seeing Vanya’s frown, Allison gathers that she’s misspoken, and deflects: “But it looks good on you. Promise.” 

Vanya sighs, staring down at the skirt again. “Do I look different?”

“Yes.”

“Then I’ll keep it.” She doesn’t sound enthused, staring critically at the tight striped shirt she’d also snatched from the pile of miscellaneous things Five had grabbed, quietly cursing herself for not instructing him on exactly what to get. 

Allison tugs herself off the stiff motel bed and leans in beside her, staring into the dingy wall mirror with reluctant acceptance. She’s barefaced, and she’d taken down her braids, hacking most of her hair off to get rid of the purple dye. She looks utterly unglamorous, and seeing as she can hardly recognize herself, she’s probably good to go. She takes one of the few stray wisps of lilac that she hadn’t succeeded in cutting off, and winds it around her finger thoughtfully as she watches Vanya frown at herself in the mirror.

She’s been in a sour mood for hours now. It’s probably because they’d left her violin behind. 

“You’re wearing _lipstick?”_ It’s a tiny thing, a thing to distract them both from the actual reason why Vanya’s upset. 

“Yeah?” Vanya says, a little defensively.

“I didn’t know that you liked makeup.”

“I don’t, really,” Vanya admits. “I always felt a little silly wearing it, like I was pretending, and the eye stuff is just a pain. But it makes me look different, so I'll do it.”

“It looks good on you.”

Vanya blushes. 

“They spelled our names wrong in _Dissenting Voice,”_ Diego says, charging through their moment like a bull in a china shop, paging through the tabloid as he shoulders his way out of the bathroom. He’d snatched it off a news stand at some point during the day. 

“You read that trash?” Allison asks.

“I do when it has our faces on it,” he replies, tossing the magazine across the bed towards her. It misses, and she doesn't bother to pick it up. 

His hair’s an absolute mess. Allison snorts at the sight of it. “You are _not_ a good blond.”

“Thanks,” he sneers, running his fingers along the edges of the eyepatch bandage he’d just applied. “Take it up with Five. He’s the one who did this to me.”

Diego snatches one of the false I.D.s they’d gotten earlier today off the table they’d left them piled on. He’d taken them to someone he’d once beaten up back in his vigilante days who’d made a second living making them; it’d take days or weeks for those licenses to be prepared if they were to head to the city DMV and have Allison rumor the person working there. So instead, he’d opted for the illegal option, and turned Allison loose on the man. She feels disquieted at how the forcefulness of her rumor wormed its way into the man’s mind, but it’s a necessity, so she swallows her shame.

“Diego de la Vega,” he mutters, then frowns. “Did you name me after _Zorro?”_

Allison smirks. “It was too easy. I’m sorry.”

Diego groans. 

Klaus, now a temporary redhead, has switched on the television, and found the news. He tears the cardboard top off a box of Clever Crisp they’d gotten, and they pass it back and forth, everyone crunching on a handful, flakes of cereal floating down to the cheap, unwashed carpet. 

Klaus cackles as the news turns from a fluff piece about a two-legged dog that learned to walk on its hind legs with a gait that falls squarely in the middle of the uncanny valley, to focusing on them, the far more interesting topic.

“What?” asks Luther, poking his platinum-dyed head out of the bathroom. “What’s funny?”

“They think we kidnapped Five.”

“They what?” Five throws a black-stained towel into the bathroom, charging out into the room.

“Yeah, look, see?” Klaus brandishes a hand stained with hair dye towards the T.V.

On the television, the chyron reads `Missing Child Vigilante Held Hostage`, over an extremely grainy image of Five that is years out of date, that had perhaps been taken before this version of him had vanished. 

“I am _not_ a child,” he mutters venomously.

“If anything, Five kidnapped us,” Ben’s voice echoes out from the bathroom, to a chorus of snickers. 

They settle in, and watch for a while. There’s a reporter at the half-leveled shell of Griddy’s Doughnuts, stomping all over the broken glass and splinters, and from what the siblings can glean from the segment, they’re all disgraced for having set everyone in Hotel Oblivion free. Not that Hotel Oblivion’s mentioned of course; just a vague supervillain jail that they’re sure Dad has made special care to be sure wouldn’t be traced back to him in particular.

To Vanya’s surprise, there’s no mention of her having attacked the city in an apocalyptic rage; she’s certain that Dad had covered for her. 

_He sure does love me,_ Vanya thinks sardonically, knowing damn well it’s to do with the preservation of his own reputation. 

Ben pads in from the bathroom, and Diego stares at him. He’s in the exact same black hoodie-and-jeans ensemble he’d been trapped in for years as a ghost. 

“So you’re just gonna…”

“It’s my look. I’m keeping it.”

“Alright then.” He throws up his hands. “Whatever. Your funeral.” He processes what he’d just said. “I swear I didn’t mean it like that--”

“I’ll give it a pass,” Ben replies, settling down at Diego's side and bumping knees with him.

“Hey,” says Allison. “It’s those guys from the diner.”

Everyone returns their attention to the television, to the sputtering black-and-white figures of their attackers, floating out from the smoking ruin of their favorite childhood place. 

“Who the hell _are_ they?” Ben wonders.

“Any clues, anyone?” asks Luther, “See something that might identify them?” 

“Well, Luther,” says Diego, “When I was being punched in the face, I got a real great look at this symbol on the floating girl’s shoulder.”

“Really?”

“No. I was busy being punched in the face.” 

“Actually, I saw something,” Klaus pipes up. “Some kind of bird symbol?”

Allison examines their uniforms carefully, and notices an out-of-place blot on each of the costumes, that she’s sure she’d be able to make out to be a sparrow, had the footage been of a higher quality. She remembers the color, the fit, and feels a flash of jealousy that she’d never been afforded the ability to choose her own costume. She’d have gone for something with big shoulders, with gloves, with…

She’s going off on a tangent. She shakes her head quickly, as if the thought will go flying out her ears. “Whoever they are, there’s no way Dad’s involved with them. He never would have let them choose their own uniforms like that.”

A chorus of agreement. Whoever they were, they’d come and left so suddenly, and anyone working with Dad would’ve stuck around to moon at the cameras. 

Naturally, the television chooses just then to identify their attackers by name. As the Sparrow Academy.

“You’ve gotta be fucking kidding me,” Allison grumbles.

“Well, where would they have even _come_ from?” Ben wonders.

“Alright,” Five growls. “That’s too much of a coincidence. The crusty old fuck’s involved.” 

“Five,” Vanya begins, with worry thick in her voice, and Allison cocks her head in confusion.

Then, she gets it, when Five vanishes in a searing flash of blue heat.

* * *

Five lands in his childhood bedroom. 

He’d chosen to come here intentionally, to give himself a minute to compose himself. He's going to speak to their father, and so he needs a minute, to figure himself out.

He wastes it, staring at the wardrobe, wondering if it’s worth the trouble of rooting through an alternate self’s uniforms for something to change into, even if he’ll be four or so years ahead of where that version of him had been when he’d last worn them, and would therefore be deeply uncomfortable.

He keeps the mission uniform on, smells and bloodstains and all.

Five decides he’s going to walk to his father, to give himself a sort of momentum he might not otherwise get if he just blinks on down and sees what happens. Besides, if the Sparrows are here, he might find signs of their presence, might witness something that might give him some sort of edge against them.

He’s still loping with one of his legs just off-center; the wounds he’d sustained in that first timeline, the one where Vanya had rained moondust down upon them all, had been negated when the Commission had stitched him up, but it’s still _here,_ in his head. 

He makes it halfway down the stairs, when he finds Pogo in the children’s hallway.

He nearly trips down a step, staring at the familiar, hunched shape. He’s aware, of course, that Pogo is alive in this timeline, but it’s still so shocking to see him with his own eyes. 

“Number Five?”

“Hey Pogo.”

Five had learned to grin from Pogo; big, tooth-baring, tight smiles are, after all, a chimpanzee threat display, and Five will admit that his own tendency to grin and bare it stems from afternoons he’d spent when he was four watching Pogo snarl at the lot of them, disciplining them for swinging from the low chandelier in the parlor. So when Pogo’s wizened brow twists upwards, he knows that this is the closest thing to a true smile as he will ever get.

He takes it as an invitation to hop off the stairwell and extend his hand, which Pogo takes. They shake like two old friends, Pogo staring at him oddly as he realizes that this Five he’s speaking to is quite different than the one he’d known years ago. 

“Your father had told me that you had returned. It seems that you and I just missed each other, before I was to accompany him elsewhere.” Pogo sighs. “If only we were reuniting now in better circumstances.”

Five draws his hand away. “So you know? About…”

“About your father’s other family?”

 _“Other_ family?”

“I’m assuming that’s what you’re here about, yes?”

“The Sparrow Academy is… another group of _us?”_

Five considers it, and it makes too much sense. The name, the uniforms, the powers... All roads keep leading back to their father, and he hates it.

“In a manner of speaking. Your father adopted thirteen children, not seven. He opted to raise you separately.” 

_In this world, or the one we came from too?_

He can’t say that, not without letting on too much.

So instead, he pinpoints something else to challenge Pogo about, something equally upsetting: “You knew.”

He isn't surprised in the least bit, so he must have known. He's _Pogo,_ their father's consummate secret-keeper, so he must have known.

Pogo dips his head bashfully. “I know most things about your father. For that matter, so does Grace.” 

It hits Five like a freight train.

 _“She_ knew too?” 

“Of course.”

Five shakes his head, huffing. “What are they here for? Why the hell’d they _attack_ us?”

Pogo sighs, staring down at the floor, as if he’ll find a script there that will tell him exactly what he’s meant to say. “Your father is angry. You disobeyed him, and you caused a great deal of trouble, and he believes you’re in need of discipline.”

“He’s trying to _kill_ us.”

“He’ll change his mind. He loves you all, you know, in his own way.” Pogo sounds like he’s trying to convince himself. 

Five simply looks at him for a moment, and he decides to be on his way. 

“It’s good to see you,” Five says over his shoulder. The hall catches his voice and bounces it off the ancient ceiling and wood paneling, on and on into the dark. 

The Sparrows aren’t in the children’s hallway, nor on the path that leads from his bedroom to the ground floor. Five keeps his eyes and ears open, stepping lightly, staring around him suspiciously, expecting an enemy lurking in every shadow. But there isn’t one; he is alone, with only the shuffling of Pogo somewhere above him, and the clicking of Grace’s heels on the tile in the kitchen. She’s making cookies again, and Five passes through the kitchen on his way to the parlor, snatching a few off the counter and shoving them in his mouth. 

In the parlor, he finds his father, sitting in his high-backed chair beneath the grand portrait of himself. In this world, the portrait isn’t riddled with bullet holes, which Five thinks is a damn shame, as it looked much better that way.

He doesn’t feel a twinge of fear at the sight of his father; why would he, when he can teleport away before anything happens? He can talk to him freely, to let him know exactly where the family stands, and he can do so without consequences. 

“What the hell are you doing?” Five growls, full of bluster.

His father simply turns, looking at him dismissively, before climbing to his feet with far more spring in his step that a man pushing ninety should be capable of. He strides past Five, and makes for the bar, his son following irritably in step behind him. 

“You had a whole other family? A whole other Academy? Dad, _why are they here?”_

Reginald pours two drinks, and though Five watches him do it carefully, when he slides it across the bar towards him, he turns it down.

“You’ve all become such a disappointment to me,” he says, “And I have decided that I’ve had enough of it. Thankfully, I had thought to develop a contingency plan some years ago, and they are here now to clean house, and to assume your place.”

Five reads between the lines: The Sparrow Academy is here to kill them. Because they want a kiss from Daddy. Great.

“That’s not gonna happen,” Five snarls.

“It will,” his father replies. “Unlike the lot of you, my other family is considerably more talented. You and your like were far too unruly, too caught up in the concept of the self, whereas my other children have excised it entirely. They are a single functioning organism, and they won't break apart as easily as you are wont to. They are far more worthy of the burden of protecting the world.” 

Five scoffs. 

“You were always so insolent,” Reginald scowls. “No respect for authority, no respect for decorum. No respect at all. It doesn’t surprise me at all that you went off and deserted your duties here. That, judging by your appearance, you’d lost yourself for _years._ Tell me, where on earth did you even _go?"_

Five glares, answering with his silence: _none of your business._

“You in particular were always so arrogant,” continues Reginald, calling the kettle black, “With an ego so large you kept tripping over it. Is it any wonder then, that you found your appetite to be disproportionate to your abilities?”

“Excuse me?”

“Aim for an acorn, Number Five, not an oak tree. _Seconds,_ not decades. Seconds are just as impactful, just as _powerful;_ you can topple an empire in a second, you can fall in love in a second. You never understood that, you always pushed and pushed and pushed for more than you could handle, and look at where it's left you. Malformed and alone, in a world that isn't yours. Tell me, do any of your siblings care for you now, after knowing how willingly you'd abandoned them? Have you found them as you remember them, or have you found that they'd gone off and grown up, while you remained the same?” 

His blood is boiling. It really is just like his father, to deflect from a serious conversation with a boneheaded critique about Five's powers. As if he'll take criticism from this man. 

Five snatches the drink out of his father’s hands, and throws it over his shoulder. “Why are they here?” he snarls again. “Why would you send them after us? If they want to be your lapdogs so badly, they can have it, and they can leave the rest of us alone.”

“The Academy has become unworthy of the trouble I endure in raising them,” Reginald says, staring at the glass scattered across the floor, “Initially, I believed it to be the influence of Number Seven, terrible as she is. Then, with the disaster that is the current state of Hotel Oblivion, I came to believe it was Number One, and his own failure in leadership. But, seeing as this trouble started when you returned, perhaps the blame is yours all along. Perhaps you're the one spreading the rot.”

Five bristles. “None of that matters. We’re not coming back. We’re leaving the city, and we’re _done_ with you.”

“No,” sighs Reginald. “I’m not so sure you are.”

There’s something crowing in the tone of his voice, stirring a poisonous prickle that skitters over Five's skin. He hasn’t felt this since he was a child, but he knows it immediately to be the instinctual awareness that he’d overstepped and made a severe mistake, that he’d exposed his neck just a little too much, and now an axe is about to drop on it.

It’s too quiet, he realizes. It’s so quiet it’s as though the Sparrows aren’t here at all.

“Where are they?” he asks reflexively, though by the time the words leave his mouth, he already knows. 

His father simply stares at him, calm as can be. 

Five jumps.

* * *

The motel they’ve chosen is on the road to Jackpine Cove.

Vanya knows it isn’t intentional, that Allison wouldn’t have meant anything by it, and that the only reason why she’d selected it at all is because it happened to be on the road out of the city that they’d selected to drive through. She knows that Jackpine is hours away, and that Allison of all people would never want to revisit the town and the street and the cabin where she’d nearly been beheaded. 

But. The motel is on the road to Jackpine Cove. 

And Vanya remembers this motel, the squat little blue-painted building, because she had driven past it with Leonard on that warm partly-cloudy afternoon when they’d driven out to his grandmother’s cabin to play with her powers. 

She remembers squirming in the cracked leather seat of his truck with her violin case planted between her knees. She’d peeled her cheek off of her palm, and stared out the window lazily, watching the countryside scroll by. They’d driven past the green-and-gold quilt of farmland, and into the high, leafy trees of some bird reserve that Vanya had entertained stopping at for a moment, dreaming up in her mind an image of wandering through the trails, hand in hand with Leonard. She remembered passing by this very motel, looking at the sign and adding it to her fantasy; they would stop for a night here, and the room would be spacious and clean and there would be a bathtub big enough to fit the both of them.

She should probably not be thinking about her serial killer boyfriend at all, let alone remembering some of their time together fondly. 

But she is. It’s hard not to; now that she’s not in a constant state of sprinting, there’s room for her thoughts, and her thoughts are still full of him. It’s only been weeks since everything had happened, after all, though it feels like years, with how much has happened since then. Vanya had destroyed the world, and then traveled through time three times, and she had toppled a cadre of intertemporal assassins, and she had escaped her father’s moon prison. Leonard kind of… vanished from her mind for a while.

But now she can’t think of something else anymore. In this world, Leonard Peabody might be alive, might be working out of Imperial Woodwares, might be spending quiet evenings reading Umbrella Academy comics in his house. He might even be at that cabin she’s thinking of, for a weekend of hiking and fishing. In this world, Leonard Peabody might be Harold Jenkins; his father might be alive, and he might’ve never gone to prison. In this world, he doesn’t seem to know her at all, and she wonders if he’s better off for it, or if he’s even worse. 

Vanya’s head throbs, thinking about that divide, between Leonard and Harold. She keeps going over him in her mind, separating him down the middle, trying to sort all those qualities into their proper categories. Leonard had been terrible, she knows, but he had also been a person, and no one had helped him. 

_I had been terrible,_ she thinks. _I still am terrible, but I am still a person, and they decided to help me..._

A particularly loud car putters by, and she winces at the sound, watching it scrape past the motel suspiciously, expecting at any moment for a police light to flick on, or a dusty window to roll down to reveal a hostile masked face leering at her. 

She should probably peel her ass off the cold bench she’s sitting on, unwrap herself from the tan blanket she’s cocooned herself in, and go back into the room. It’s the middle of spring, but it’ll still get chilly at night.

But she stays put. She’s testing, in that strange way that children too insecure to ask directly will test their peers to see how long it takes before they’ll notice something important. Vanya isn’t afraid of her family anymore, and she’s quite comfortable with the knowledge that she still loves them dearly. But she wants to see if they’ll notice she’d left. She wants them to come looking for her, and to sit beside her, looking out across the parking lot to the dark smear of trees across the highway, and she wants them to talk to her about anything and everything.

They don’t. 

She gets why, of course; it's only this strange, irrational feeling in her, that's making her worry that her family is falling into the old habit of pretending she is invisible. It's that Five’s back, from wherever he’d gone, and Vanya’s being out here is in some way tied to her petty anger at him, for fucking off on them again. She can hear his voice, muffled through the thin door, as he leads an animated discussion on the Sparrow Academy, and how Dad has apparently had a whole other family this entire time.

She’s heard it all, and she isn’t angry in the slightest, to hear that their father had other children, that those children also had powers, that he’d raised them apart from the Umbrella Academy, and that he’s seen fit to swap them out. 

She isn’t angry. If anything, she feels a strange pang of empathy for them.

 _Did he ignore you too?_ she wonders to the Sparrows, staring off at the blue bloom of evening, as if her thoughts are powerful enough to summon some sort of response. _Did he pack you off and send you far away, to keep you out of sight and out of mind? In this world, I was included along with the rest of them, but I have no memories of it, none at all. I have more in common with you than with any of them._

Vanya decides she’s going to listen, to see if she can divine some sort of answer about all these sharp feelings warring in her. She’s nervous, and her foot is tapping an anxious rhythm on the concrete sidewalk; for the life of her, she doesn’t understand why everyone inside the room is so calm. There’s nowhere that’s safe for them right now, even if they all look different, to one degree or another, even if they’re outside state border and halfway across Michigan. 

She stares at the fading stain of twilight at the edge of the sky, and she throws out her senses. There’s the drone of that old car as it vanishes into a tunnel of night. There’s the rumble of her siblings’ bickering from the other side of the wall behind her. There’s the scraping of her cheap Hotel Oblivion-branded slipper against the ground. There’s the whooping of a coyote somewhere in the dark, the creaking chorus of night insects, the skimming of a handful of feet touching down in a field some ways away, a hissed whisper in a language she doesn’t recognize…

Wait.

Vanya focuses on the latter. On a rustling of noise at the far end of her reach, the sound of six people trying very hard not to be heard, as they trek across a field, the tall grass lapping at the rubbery material coating their knees and shins. Vanya can speak, read and understand seven languages, but whatever they are speaking now isn’t one of them. 

And they are moving towards the motel.

Vanya leaps off the bench and skids into the room, her blanket whipping behind her like a childish sort of cape. “We need to go, _right_ now,” she says. 

Her siblings blink owlishly at her for a moment.

“They’re here?” Five asks.

“They’re coming.” 

“Who?”

“Who do you _think,_ Allison?” Klaus snarks. 

“From where?” Diego’s on his feet, is shouldering past her, and charging out into the parking lot, their siblings streaming behind him. He already has a knife out, and it’s glinting in the harsh orange glow of the streetlamp.

Vanya points. They’re out of the field now, walking along the side of the road, and they’ll be in sight of the motel, and of the seven fugitives standing so painfully visibly in the parking lot, any minute now. 

“Great,” Diego grimaces. “Rematching already. Fine, whatever.”

“No,” says Luther. “We need to get out of here.”

“What?” asks Ben.

“They’re coming, so I’ll bet the cops aren’t too far behind. And honestly, I don’t think they’re worth the fight.”

“You don’t think we can take them?” Five challenges.

“I think we can, but if they’re just like us, as you said, then it means this fight’s going to be close. Maybe we win, maybe we don’t, but it’ll cost us a lot, and we just got Ben back. And besides, how much else are we going to destroy? There are other people at this motel, and the last time we all fought, we leveled a building. We have to minimize as much collateral as we can, because I don't think they will.”

“It won’t exactly help our case if we end up killing a bunch of people in the crossfire,” Allison adds.

Five crosses his arms, but doesn’t argue.

“For what it’s worth, I’m very much _for_ staying alive,” Ben says.

“So what do we do instead?” Diego asks. 

“Jump?” asks Five.

“No,” Klaus says. “Wouldn’t that make it obvious that it’s us? It’s dark out, and you can see that shit a long ways away.”

“Run,” Luther decides. “We need to run for now. Until we find somewhere far enough away.”

They take off, skirting the perimeter of the motel, and disappearing into the woods blanketing it, crashing through the undergrowth and ruining the clothes they’d just stolen. It’s dark, so dark they may as well be running blind, and the branches lash at their faces, clinging to their sleeves and hair. They can’t see each other, but can hear their footsteps stumbling alongside one another, or a little ahead or behind, and so they know they’re all moving in the same direction.

There’s a sharp incline that they don’t find so much as they each individually trip over, and descend in varying states of grace; Allison slides down it on her knees, Klaus somersaults accidentally, Luther bounds right over the drop and lands so forcefully that he makes the trees shiver, and Diego takes a flying leap directly into Ben. 

They emerge, one by one, onto a thin, unlit farm road, each hovering uncertainly within the treeline, waiting for the others to appear, before noting the black silhouette of a disused barn ahead of them, and concluding correctly that the rest of the family would head to it if they were to see it.

One by one, the siblings trickle in, in various states of disrepair, until Klaus, the last of them to break out of the woods, has joined them. There’s no joy in the reunion; they’re too busy trying to keep their hearts from beating holes through their chests and bursting out, to continue running.

They’re quiet for a moment, staring off into the dark, waiting for six more shapes to join them, but they do not come. Vanya listens, to cries of discovery a mile away, at the far edge of her sphere of influence; their pursuers have found the motel, have found their stolen car and their room. She cannot understand what they are saying, but she knows they’ll conclude that the siblings won’t be far.

She relates this to her siblings, who bristle with anxiety. 

Five offers to jump them, which they agree to.

“But then what?” challenges Allison. “Where do we go _after_ this?”

“We’ll need to start over,” groans Luther. “New clothes, new car. I’ve got my I.D. in my pocket, and Allison’s, and-- oh, good, Diego, you have yours. But the rest of our stuff is back in the room, and we’re not going to risk a fight.”

“Come on,” Allison says, “We have _Vanya,_ we can--”

“--Vanya’s untrained,” Ben points out. “And she doesn’t have her violin anymore. So either she’s sidelined or she could blow all of us up.”

Klaus drops on his ass onto a hay bale, and immediately regrets the cloud of allergens that his weight displaces. “So, do we leave the country? Or does that crack open an international can of worms?”

“The latter,” Five says succinctly. 

_“Shit.”_

Diego’s been quiet. He’s standing in a shaft of moonlight, lifting that crumpled photo of Lila up to the weak, gray light. 

It gives him an idea.

“What if the Commission knows? About them, I mean. They must’ve known about Lila, right? So why not us, or the Sparrows too?”

“They have files on everything,” Five agrees. “It’d make sense.”

“And are those files still intact, after the fire?”

“Some of them would be in the basement, so I guess so.”

“Then let’s head there,” Diego proposes. “Let’s get a car and drive up to Headquarters and see if they have anything on the Sparrows, or on Lila. Or on us. Something that might help us understand what we’re dealing with.” 

“That’s one big risk we’d be taking,” Ben disagrees. “Say we drive up there and there’s nothing at all? Remember what Dad said, about transit being the most vulnerable part of an operation. We need to _lay low,_ not take a road trip and risk getting seen or pulled over or both. We need to find somewhere quiet to just _sit_ for a minute, and wait for things to settle down, right, Klaus?”

Klaus blinks. “No?”

"What? What do you mean _'no?'"_

"I mean, _no._ I want to keep moving. You know, we don't have to agree on _everything."_

"Did I say we did?" 

As the two of them break into hennish bickering, Luther examines his family. Even if they didn’t have mud streaked on their arms and legs and leaves tangled in their hair, they’re a collection of people who don’t seem like they’d fit together, and would therefore draw stares, and be remembered long after they’d left. They stood out in their original timeline, they stood out in the sixties and the fifties, and they’ll stand out here. Especially with their faces plastered on every television from here to the North Pole. He looks down at his arms, enormous and pulling at the seams of the XXXL jacket Five had procured for him; he's just not going to be able to pass for normal, the way the rest of them might be able to.

He thinks back, to Hotel Oblivion, to something Diego had proposed to them when they’d first set foot in the lobby.

“We need to split up.”

Klaus and Ben cease their first domestic squabble. “What?” Ben asks, as if he'd just heard Luther propose they go unicorn hunting.

“You heard me. If we’re together, we’re too recognizable. We might have a better go of this if we’re apart. Diego, you can head up to New York and take a look for those files, Ben, you can hide out. I’ll join you, because I’m big enough to draw attention; I’m not going to be able to disappear like the rest of you.”

“It could work,” Five’s saying, “Dad said the Sparrows stick together, so I think there’s a pretty good chance that they wouldn’t be able to follow all of us. Or if they did, they might have a harder time tracking us down.”

“You’re assuming that Dad isn’t lying,” Luther points out.

“I don’t think he was,” Five admits. “It’d make sense, wouldn’t it? They're like us, but they were all raised together; Dad said they were like an organism, and organisms don't break up. And besides, I could just jump back and forth, and make sure everyone’s alright. We might be apart, but it won't be as though we'd lose touch with each other.”

“No,” Vanya protests. “No, that’s _stupid._ We can’t separate.”

But she’s unheard, under the chorus of agreement that breaks out among the rest of her family, who are tired and anxious and eager for some sort of direction. She’s unheard when Five jumps them a state over, and she’s unheard when they file into two separate stolen cars, and she’s unheard when they part ways. 

An awful, sinking dread is settling in her gut, as she watches her family split apart, and finds herself just as invisible at the heart of the family as she'd been on its outskirts.

* * *

Lila arrives at the smoldering wreck of what had once been Griddy’s Doughnuts, and she arrives too late. _I always seem to be too late,_ she reflects angrily. _Everyone’s always running off ahead of me, and I can never catch up, I can never hold on tight enough to keep anything before someone’s gone and ripped it out of my hands._

Everyone she’d been hoping to run into is long gone by the time she turns the corner, finds the source of the column of blue smoke rising amidst the buildings like a strange mirage of a skyscraper. The building’s been taped off by police officers, who swarm the wreckage. There’s a thick crowd of onlookers staring on, pointing and jabbering about what had happened there, and news vans are stacked up and down the curb.

At first, Lila feeds herself to the crowd, shouldering her way to the front, so she might be able to hear what the reporters are saying, but they don’t have much to offer her, only that the Umbrella Academy had been here, and that they’d been attacked by a brand new, minty-fresh team of superheroes who’d appeared out of nowhere, and were far more worthy of the city’s love and respect than those dented old Umbrellas.

She isn’t totally sure about that, but it’s irrelevant. Whoever the Sparrow Academy are, and whatever they intend, they hate the Umbrella Academy enough to try to kill them in broad daylight, so they’re good enough for her. The enemy of her enemy is her friend, and so she will befriend them. They both want the Academy dead, and therefore, they can trust each other.

And besides, they have powers.

And Lila… well. She doesn’t. She doesn’t have them unless she is among her kind, and thus far, the Umbrella Academy are the only ones of her sort she’s ever come across, and that sure had ended well, hadn’t it?

She isn’t sure if the Sparrow Academy are her sort of people, but she’s willing to place a bet on it being so. So she gambles everything.

With a power such as hers, Lila Pitts spends most her time consigned to the endless insult that is ordinariness. She cannot teleport to the department store that Number Five is sighted at, or the parking lot that Diego is seen skulking around, so she takes the bus. She cannot simply open her mouth and compel an easy ride off of a man leaving the city, as she has deduced the Academy are doing, so she relies on a cool, confident smile and a promise of money she does not have to take her part of the way there, and her own reflexes to leap out of the car and roll off the road safely when she arrives where she needs to go.

She’s out of range of the Hargreeves siblings, and she’s been out of range of them all day. Yet somehow, the very road she’s guessed that they’ll take out of the city seems to be the correct one. Somehow, she’d known they would drive northeast, that they’d want to stop somewhere, that they’d choose this very kitschy motel.

It isn’t luck.

It’s her power, she knows implicitly. Powers are like muscles, she’s concluded; one must stretch them regularly to prevent injury, to make them stronger, to keep them from softening and eroding away, to unlock new thresholds of ability never before seen. 

She’s already so behind, she frets. She’d spent her entire childhood knowing of her specialness, but never indulging in it, never stretching that muscle, and now she fears she’s too late again. Not only does she have so little practice with any of the powers she’d plucked up, but she doesn’t understand this extra background noise buzzing in the back of her head, these scraps of thoughts and feelings that aren’t hers. 

For one, she’s had a persistent, debilitating ache in one of her eyes for hours now, and she’s very, very aware of who she’d gotten it from. 

For another, while on the bus, she’d dozed off on the drive to the department store, and had woke to the persistent hands of a small old women laden down with shopping bags, asking if she could kindly scoot over so she could sit down. Lila hadn’t, and she had told the woman in a voice that made her clap her mouth shut and stare in shock; she had told the old woman to fuck off in Ancient Greek, a language she does not speak. 

The Hargreeves siblings are out of her reach, yet she is not out of theirs; they’ve left their marks on her, in not just the bruises littering her skin under her bomber jacket, but on the inside of her mind, and she doesn’t understand how exactly her power had done this.

 _But,_ she thinks hungrily, as she strides across the field just behind the motel in question, feeling the wonderful prickle of her internal compass pointing urgently in its direction, _I might learn._

There’s a car, wide open and lit up from the inside, in the middle of the half-empty lot, with its guts spilled out across the asphalt. Someone had ransacked it, and she can guess who and why.

She turns the corner, and stops, halfway into the parking lot. Ahead of her, there’s a bustle of movement in one of the rooms on the ground floor of the motel, five or six shapes moving back and forth in blots of shadow behind the gauzy curtains. And reclining on the bench outside is a slender woman with a long, banded ponytail, deep brown skin, and a pleated orange-red skirt spread over her legs. She’s leaning on something, a shape that Lila recognizes to be a violin case.

And, when she’s close enough for Lila to make out the features on her face, she finds that she is wearing a mask. Which explains why she’s so unresponsive; the mask is concealing her eyes, which are surely closed, and her slouch is due to her being asleep on lookout duty _(tut, tut)._

She’s struck gold.

Lila hangs back a moment, and evaluates. She’d seen little of these powers, the television being far too low a quality to divine much from, but that doesn’t matter at all, because she can see them in her mind, laid out for her like six different flavors of ice cream, all waiting for her to take a scoop and eat it.

And as she feels the powers wash over her, as she opens herself wide and hungrily drinks them in, she also pulls in those extra bits of person that she never intends to keep: snippets of Norwegian, a language she does not speak a word of, yet one that she finds herself thinking in for a few scattered sentences. A deep, surging urge to stay close to them, to not allow herself to part from them for a moment.

The urgent hunger for someone, for a missing link in their chain, for another member to complete their team.

Lila grins. She’s going to be that someone. 

She reaches out, and flicks through the powers, as if she were turning the pages of a book. She needs something dramatic, something immediately recognizable, something so unmistakably theirs that they won’t be able to dismiss it as anything other than what it is, but something that won’t be interpreted as a motive for violence.

So, that rules many of these powers out right away; they’re all so distinct from one another, and while she’s sure she can find a use for most of them, unlike those of the Umbrella Academy (ghosts? What’s she going to do with _ghosts?),_ they are all decidedly less powerful than the ability to leap through space and time at will, the summoning of interdimensional monsters, or the ability to shake the moon from the sky.

But she makes do just fine.

The Sparrow Academy come streaming out in a neat line from the motel room, frowning at the disappearance of their marks, and already jabbering to one another about where they might look next.

“They’ve gone hitchhiking,” decides Four, who is countered by Three’s desire to search the woods just beyond the motel, and Six’s assurance that if they break down every single door in the place, they’ll surely find them hiding in some other room. 

Then, they stop dead in their tracks. One reaches down, to shake Carla awake. 

She frowns at him, so annoyed at his interruption to her dreaming, but the complaint dies in her mouth, which drops open.

Lila greets them hovering a full ten feet from the ground, her hair flowing freely around her head, as though she were underwater. 

“Hi,” she says, and by the pleasurable chill that races down her spine, she knows that she’s got their full attention.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Note: as of the release of this fic, the fourth volume of the Umbrella Academy comic series hasn’t been released, nor has any information on any future seasons of TUA, which at this fic's publication has not been renewed for a third season (...yet). Ergo, I’m working with virtually no knowledge of canon beyond that point. Therefore, the Sparrows as they’re depicted here will certainly age horribly. I'm okay with that.
> 
> I’m using as much of canon as I can glean, with a few adjustments: we know none of the Sparrows’ names, save Carla’s. What we do know of the Sparrows is:  
> -they’re based in Norway  
> -the blond guy is Number One  
> -everyone’s power but Carla’s is at least touched upon (though I'm making a change to One's to keep him distinct from Luther; two blond super strong Number Ones is too many)  
> -they're a mostly-female group (which the show seems to have conveniently forgotten, which... yeah, sounds about fucking right, given how the show treats female characters)
> 
> Additionally, I racebent One (and will probably have retroactively done so for several others once we learn more about them, being that I'm working with only a few panels of info), because two blonde white guys with super strength being One is too repetitive for my taste. So, fic-One, aside from having a power different from but similar in appearance to super strength, dyes his hair blonde, and originally hails from Asia. This was decided well before S2 aired, and we ended up getting an Asian Number One in not-Ben. So... I guess I accidentally strayed closer to canon there. Happy accident!  
> (Edit as of 1/11/21: lol looks like they retconned that away, huh)


	2. sweet, sweet lies

Grace Hargreeves, in the timeline that no longer exists, had been made for Vanya. In the timeline that had taken its place, this is still so; she had been created, as before, to take the place of the unfortunate nannies who hadn’t been equipped to look after such a powerful child. Some things do not change, and Vanya’s immense power proving to be a danger to the ill-informed ordinary women tasked with caring for her had been one of those things.

Seeing his success in Grace’s implementation in the life of his seventh charge, Sir Reginald Hargreeves had opted to expand his creation’s function, to rewrite her from the caretaker of a single child, to that of each and every one of the Hargreeves children.

Including his second family.

Grace, being a robot, had taken to the change without protest, and without question. It was not her place to wonder why she suddenly had thirteen children to look out for, or why six of those children were half a world away in a concrete bunker in the Norwegian mountains. It was not her place to wonder why her software was uploaded to such a different physical form. It was her place to care for the children, and cook for them, and clean for them, and love them as best as she was able, and in that place she had no choice but to be content.

Grace, being a robot, is bound by certain hard limitations. For one, she is not allowed to leave either home in which she lives. For another, she is not allowed to tell the Umbrella Academy about their siblings. She is simply not able to do so; it had been hardwired into her code that she would not tell them, and so she didn’t and doesn’t, and goes about her life quietly aware that their family is much bigger than any of her children can even imagine. 

Grace, being a robot, has the ability to maintain a single mind in two physical bodies; there were not two Graces, but one consciousness in two bodies, active simultaneously. The first, being the one that Sir Reginald would interact with on a daily basis, was fashioned in the shape of his long-lost fiancee, as the form was most agreeable to him. The second, being a body Sir Reginald had no interactions with, and therefore no stake in the appearance of, was that of a large, luminous cube. It did not matter at all, that the mother the Sparrow Academy had known was bound to remain inside their bunker while the rest of them flew to the United States, as their mother would be there to greet them in a different form. 

Grace, being a robot, is not allowed to disagree with Sir Reginald on any of his judgments; he is right, always, always, _always,_ and she is to always, always, _always_ obey. 

So the situation she is in now is one she simply doesn’t know what to do with.

Examining it now, Grace realizes that this impasse she is at has been coming for a very, very long time. 

It had started with Vanya, with the splintering of her mind and her attack on the city, a horribly upsetting situation that Reginald had assured her could be easily fixed, and had been for the best, as Vanya’s trip would give her the rest and relaxation she needed.

Her biosensors had told her that Sir Reginald had been lying, but because he was Sir Reginald, and Sir Reginald could not lie, she filed that discrepancy away in the back of her mind, and returned to her housework. She was so _silly,_ making a mountain out of a molehill.

Then, all of her children had changed. It had happened so quickly, so soon on the heels of Number Five’s reappearance. Each and every one of them had suddenly and abruptly changed, in the way they walked, in the way they talked, in the way they spoke to one another, in the way their very hearts beat. For the life of her, Grace simply could not deduce what had caused the change; she had vetted the most likely options (a scuffle, or a sour reaction to her pot roast, or a sickness) and found them unsatisfactory. So, Grace had coped with the unpleasantness by making cookies.

Then, they had vanished. They had been gone for several days, without a word, without a note, without a single missing suitcase or sock to clue her in as to where she had gone. 

So she had waited.

 _And perhaps,_ she frets, _I had waited too long._

Because by the time she had realized that her children had returned, and had puttered down from the far corners of the house, which she had been giving their monthly dusting, they had gone, and they had brought a trail of delinquents through her nice home. Grace had been so concerned with washing the floors clean of the dozens of filthy footprints that had marred them, that she had not heard the news about her children until some hours later, when her other body had listened to her second family discuss the mission they were to uphold.

It’s… _difficult_ to wrap her mind around. 

Grace had always known, in some respect, that her two families would someday combine. It was a secret truth she knew to be true, deep in her coding, and one she clung to when she was not quite certain of what she was doing, or why she was doing it. She knew only that there was a plan, and that Sir Reginald had devised it carefully, and that she need only trust in it and all would be well.

Well, she had trusted. And all is not well. All is clearly not well, since she has not been instructed to set the dinner table for fourteen, and Dr. Pogo had been sitting in the rooftop garden, so awfully morose, when she had brought him his dinner. 

In fact, all is the opposite of well, and she has no idea how all had suddenly become unwell. 

An hour after she greets her second family when they arrive in the mansion, when they’ve already gone off to play with their siblings, she asks Sir Reginald. 

Grace is not meant to ask questions, she knows, it’s so silly of her to do so, but it’s allowed by her programming, as Sir Reginald, in all his excellence, had foreseen that Grace would need to be capable of intellect to perform her job as maid and caretaker as well as she was able.

So, she knows she is not out of line, when she clicks up to Sir Reginald in his study. She knows that she can ask him about the children. It’s just that she doesn’t want to bother him, doesn’t want to interrupt his very important work by running her mouth for such an inconsequential reason. That is all.

Grace gives herself a little shake, to dispel the silly thought that anything might be wrong, and sets to work cleaning the study especially carefully. She’s exhausted all the cookie dough in the house, and though she had put in an order for the ingredients for more, they won’t be here for another day. 

There, she finds the day’s newspaper folded over the arm of Sir Reginald’s chair, and there, she finds her answer.

It really is horrible, so horrible it makes her head spin on its anchor. Grace had always believed that someday, she would no longer have to live in two places at once, that someday her halves of the family would join together and be whole, and she would have twice as many bedrooms to clean and meals to cook and children to chide for running with scissors. She is prepared for this; she had been preparing for almost twenty-five years for the joining of Sir Reginald’s families, and she had devised every possible parenting protocol for that day.

Every possible protocol, that is, but for the situation that is currently unfolding outside of the walls that she cannot leave.

Grace sighs as well as she can, which is not well at all, as her face is frozen in a perpetual smile, and she had been programmed to make only the most pleasant of noises at all times; Sir Reginald Hargreeves dislikes it when women are not perfectly pleasant at all times.

All her children are fighting with each other, and she simply doesn’t know what to do. 

* * *

When Diego had climbed into his stolen car and made for the Adirondacks, he hadn’t gone alone. He’d expected Klaus to join him, after the scuffle that had erupted in the barn between him and Ben, but he had to admit, he’d been surprised when Allison had leapt into the backseat. 

"Someone has to keep you two in line," she explains, and they accept it.

It probably has something to do with Luther, but he knows better than to poke that sleeping dragon. Whatever’s going on there, he’s not going to question it; he just hopes that they figure it out. Klaus has the good sense to do the same, and Allison is silently grateful for it.

As soon as only a few weeks ago, Diego would’ve resented them for riding along, but now, after everything that’s happened, he’s happy they’re both here. Allison’s power has proven exceptionally helpful in protecting them on the road to the ruins, and in procuring for them everything they might need for their long hike and excavation. And Klaus is… well, he’s just _fun,_ and knowing that Klaus had decided to seek out his presence satisfies something in him that he doesn’t quite have a name for.

The road trip to the old Commission base isn’t fun; it’s uncanny, stirring in them the strange sort of wonder that only time travelers who’ve visited the same location at different points in time feel; they realize that they are driving along the same roads they’d taken in 1955, passing under the same trees, now taller, the same mountains, now crumbled. They pass through towns that had grown into cities, or else crumbled into main streets walled in by crumbling brick shells, and as they go, Allison feels herself sink into a quicksand of melancholy, keenly aware of how much time has passed, of how Odessa and Raymond and Miles and Jill and all the people from South Dallas she hadn’t exactly been friends with, but had been acquainted to, are all dead.

They pass by a graveyard, and both she and Klaus go tense; he, because he’d seen a ghost, she, because she can practically feel them. 

It is also tense and quiet and punctuated with each of the three of them. The radio never stays on for long, they never laugh or share raucous stories or stop at the world’s largest ball of yarn, or the things that they suppose that ordinary people who go on road trips do; they are far too preoccupied with glancing around uncertainly for cop cars, for shapes floating in from the clouds, for some kind of sign that they’re being followed. They haven’t been stopped or recognized, but they’re on edge until they’re deep in the mountains, until they’re pulling off the narrow backroad Five told them would lead them where they’ll need to go. 

By the way the road’s all but destroyed from over half a century of wear and tear and little traffic, Diego feels pretty safe about the Home Office remaining undiscovered, and he’s proven correct, when they’ve hiked up the overgrown trails to the ruins of the Commission campus.

Five is there, waiting coolly with a smarmy grin, perched on a rusty old car.

“You’re late,” he says, clearly enjoying himself.

Diego rolls his eyes--well, _eye--_ at him; Five sure does love that power of his, and he loves this position they’d agreed he’d take on when they split up. He is going to serve as a sort of intermediary for the factions of the Academy, bouncing back and forth across the country as the need arises, now that Klaus, Allison and Diego have settled in at the ruins, and the other party has found their hideaway. Diego’s pretty certain that Five’s going to let the power go to his head.

Five has proven to be of little help, once he’s given the siblings a tour of the piles of rubble, rising like strange hills under the veils of green that had grown up to consume the place in the sixty-four years since they’d destroyed it. 

They learn to accept his presence as that of an alley cat’s; impermanent and constantly elusive, and profoundly unreliable-- he is here one minute, gone the next, and there’s simply no way of knowing if he’s around at all, unless he’s directly in their eyeline. The skinny little fucker simply vanishes in a flash when Allison presents a shovel towards him, and that is that. 

The Hargreeves family had never gone camping before. They’d never really spent much time outside of cities before, so Diego, Klaus and Allison are exposed to the wonders of struggling to pitch a tent that Allison had nicked from a sporting goods store they’d passed on their way into the mountains, of poison ivy creeping up Diego’s legs, and of Klaus trying his very best not to give the family food poisoning with what he concocts over a poorly-constructed campfire. And, to put it succinctly, the less said about their bathroom situation, the better.

But they grit their teeth and figure it out. They’ve survived an apocalypse, traveled through time, and they toppled the very organization whose ashes they’re sifting through. They can handle this. It isn’t glamorous, especially now that they’ve reached that especially fun part of the year where the bugs start to awaken, but there’s something kind of wonderful about how the three of them have taken to sleeping in a mess of blankets, limbs tangled together, buried in the warm, heavy weight of each other, while Allison reads aloud from one of the bustier-splitting historical romance novels she’d found backseat in the car she’d stolen, the ones that Klaus can’t stop snickering at. 

It takes them over a week, to hack through all the brambles, the tall grass, the ropes of ivy, the gnarled roots of the trees that had sprung up in the midst of the wreckage. But they have nothing but time now, so they don’t worry about it as much as they might have weeks ago, a contrast that leaves them all off-balance and slightly adrift. 

They’ve all spent so long in a state of sprinting, when days felt like they’d lasted for weeks, and weeks for months. Now that there isn’t an apocalypse breathing down their necks, or the threat of imminent death swinging at them like an axe-- just a shapeless, hovering dread somewhere beyond the horizon in the shape of the Sparrows-- the days fly away from them. They’ve been in the Adirondacks for half a month, and somehow, it feels like they’d parted ways with Ben, Luther and Vanya only yesterday. 

The effect is especially disconcerting to Klaus, if he’s honest; it’s as though he’ll blink, and suddenly, another day will have vanished into smoke. It makes him a little worried, about going to sleep; an irrational part of him is convinced that he’ll close his eyes, and wake up to find that the vines have grown over the tent, that he is now longer alongside Allison and Diego, that they’d died a hundred years ago and he’s caught up in their corpses, and even their ghosts had left him.

Ghosts. They’re a thing Klaus had been bracing himself for as they’d first wandered through the wreckage, but they’re simply… _not_ here. There isn’t a single person, alive or dead, on the grounds apart from them, and honestly, Klaus kind of wishes there was. It’s too quiet up here.

There are a lot of reasons why, he knows. It’s been sixty-something years since the place went up in flames, and sixty-something years is a long time to make peace with your situation, or to find the light, or to grow so bored with the same old bricks that you decide that you may as well wander the earth for a while. 

None of them quite satisfy. A part of him wonders if the people they’d killed had even been capable of shedding ghosts; from what little Five has let on about them, they seem practically inhuman. 

But there are no ghosts. Not in the woods, not sitting atop the lone intact chimney that stands like a strange tree husk in the middle of the pile of blackened bricks and mostly-rotted wood, not even in the dark cavity that leads down to the basement that Diego leaps into far too fearlessly.

Allison and Klaus follow, skidding down into the basement cautiously. It’s dark, but there are enough holes in the ceiling allowing shafts of watery, grayish light to pierce through that they don’t have much trouble seeing, even if they didn’t have flashlights. Roots dangle down and grab at them like witch’s fingers, and the floor is coated in a fine layer of mud and dirt, crisscrossed with the tracks of small animals that must have fallen or burrowed down here years ago. The smell of rust and moldy paper is thick in the air, and the basement is stacked with a maze of rusted file cabinets.

“Hey,” Diego says, stepping out from amid the maze. “Let’s get to work.” 

Before long they’re all neck-deep in the extremely tedious process of deciphering the Commission’s truly abysmal filing system in search of some sort of information on Lila or the Sparrows. Really, it’s like the place was designed to be as cumbersome as possible. 

“When Five gets back,” Diego mutters, “Remind me to yell at him for fucking off on us.”

“Will do,” supplies Klaus, who winces at the way his voice echoes off of the half-collapsed basement walls, twisting until it doesn’t sound like him anymore.

He keeps Diego in the corner of his eye; that old, familiar anger’s been sinking back into him, and now he’s wired with tension as he stalks through the rows of half-melted file cabinets, tossing file after file in a growing pile on the floor. Something’s not right with him.

In fact, Allison’s a little off too; Klaus wonders if it’s the ever-present worry that a flock of bloodthirsty superheroes will crash in at any second. That particular metaphorical boulder has been weighing on him for a while. 

Or maybe it’s the loneliness. It just doesn’t feel right, without the rest of the family here. He keeps looking over his shoulder, starting to say something to Ben, only to remember that he’d opted to go elsewhere. 

They’re in a weird place right now, still taking the earliest steps down a road they’ve probably been circling for years, but it’s very important that they get this right. And to get this right, they have to pull themselves apart for a while; after their years together, he knows very well that they’re stuck together to such an extent that it had nearly destroyed them, and he also knows that if they’re left to their own devices, they’ll probably spiral back down into that muck all over again.

It’s a problem, he knows, and he’s sure Ben knows too. It’s a problem, and he just… doesn’t know how to solve it, how to prevent the two of them from falling back into old habits. He can tell that there’s something missing, and he can’t put his finger on what, exactly, it is. 

Distance isn’t helping. It’s just making him feel cold and numb all over.

Allison kicks a rusted file cabinet with the toe of her uniform boot irritably. Judging by the night she’d spent alone in the half-destroyed observatory, from which she returned puffy-eyed and silent, he gets the sense that she’s dealing with a similar sort of problem. 

Allison plops down on the floor, blowing on her raw, stinging palms. They’d cracked open yesterday, thanks to hours and hours of tugging on rough branches. 

“When I was a kid,” she says when she notices Klaus peering at her, “I thought about being an archaeologist.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Am not. I always thought history was cool. And that it’d be neat, swinging into tombs and stealing artifacts, and outrunning booby traps.” Allison sweeps her maze of wild hair out of her eyes. “And this is archaeology, right? It counts?”

“Well, we’re trespassing, we’re fucking up a ruin, and we’re definitely going to steal something from down here. And everyone’s ghosts seem to have left, but if they hadn’t, I’m sure they’d be real pissed about us trampling around here. So I think it counts.”

Allison hums, turning her hands over to inspect the scratches on the backs of her palms. “I just didn’t think it’d be this _boring.”_

Klaus laughs. He peers at Allison’s hands, and then at his own, at the words written there; the tattoos on his hands had stayed, but the ones he’d gotten in Vietnam are gone from his shoulder and back and belly. Maybe he’ll get them redone, assuming he lives long enough to do so.

“Strange, huh?” Allison says. She’s clearly noticed Klaus glancing down at his bare shoulder, and has deduced his thought process. 

“What?” Klaus says, still half in his own head.

“Being here again. Being here _years_ later.” 

“Oh, yeah.”

“I keep remembering that,” Allison says, a bitter edge slicing through her words. “It’s not enough that we’ve landed in an alternate universe, but all the people we do know are gone regardless.” She sighs, and glances off at the ragged patches of sky showing through the many holes in the ceiling. 

“Still waiting for it?” Klaus asks.

Allison grins, gathering that the _it_ he’s referring to is herein defined as _‘a pack of siblings we never even knew existed crashing in from the heavens to kill us.’_

“Yup.” She runs her hand through her curls. “You know, I don’t think there’s anything on them down here. This place was a wreck before we changed the timeline, right? So if the Sparrows only happened because of what _we_ did--”

“Is that even the case?”

“With Dad,” Diego’s voice echoes, “Who the fuck knows? Maybe they were always there, and we just never learned about them. He’s kept so much from us, after all.” 

Allison and Klaus hum in reluctant agreement. 

“I swear,” Klaus groans, “Every time the guy hits rock bottom he just… keeps digging.”

“I see you learned something from him after all,” Allison snarks, and then winces, when she sees Klaus freeze up. “Too far?”

He shrugs. “I mean, I buy it.”

This Klaus, the one he’s replacing, isn’t clean. He’s right back to square one, no matter what, and he’s been itching at himself for days now. Honestly, he’s kind of grateful he’s in the middle of bumfuck nowhere; kind of hard to fall back into old habits if there’s no possible fix unless you’re willing to walk miles upon miles through the undergrowth, which Klaus, at least so far, is avoiding. 

Allison pulls herself to her feet, wiping her hands on her soiled jeans. “I’m gonna head up, look around. You think we should just have someone on lookout duty, just in case?”

“Makes sense,” replies Diego from somewhere unseen. “Probably shouldn’t be me.”

Silence, then: “I’m joking,” Diego says. “I made a joke. About my eye. About how I have one eye that works.”

“Oh.”

_“Oh.”_

“You can go now, Allison.”

“Oh, thank God, I’ve been dismissed.” She rolls her eyes in exaggerated fashion at Klaus, who bats playfully at her arm as she heads off to the half-crumpled wall, to start climbing out. 

And then Klaus and Diego are alone together.

Klaus approaches Diego carefully. He’s deep in the employee records, facing away from him, and he’s pulled one folder out and set it aside. Klaus tilts his head, to read the label.

Number Five, it says.

“That’s him? _Our_ Five?”

Diego doesn’t answer.

“Here,” Diego says suddenly, tapping at a folder in the middle of a cabinet. He’d searched the P cabinets for over an hour, and he’s found Lila Pitts at last. 

“What’s it say?” Klaus tilts his head over Diego’s shoulder.

Diego begins flicking through the pages, and for a moment, Lila’s dark, serious eyes glare up at him from her headshot as he passes it by. “Some assassinations here and there, nothing all that substantial. I guess she isn’t that great at her job.”

Klaus looks at Diego’s eyepatch.

“That follows. I mean, _jeez,_ she couldn't even take the whole damn eye out.”

“Oh, and here we go: we have the same birthday.” 

“What?”

“Yep, says here,” Diego points at the page, “October first, ‘89. She got hers from the same place as the rest of us did.”

“Isn’t she younger than us, though? She looked younger.”

“She’s a time traveler, Klaus. She can be younger than us _and_ the same age as us. Kind of like… _whatever_ that is with Five.”

“Huh. How about that. One more sister we didn’t even know about. Guess these guys got to her first.”

It’s weird, to think that that strange cosmic hiccup that had spat the Umbrella Academy out into the world had, in fact, spat out seven other siblings. They really do know so _little_ about themselves. Maybe Dad doesn’t know either, maybe he’s keeping that from them. Regardless, it feels to Klaus as though they’ve suddenly flicked a lighter on in a dark room, and though they can see only a foot in front of themselves, they finally have _light._

Klaus had spent a lot of time thinking about it, staring at the ceiling, or at the grains of wood in the wall and wondering. He was always less interested in the grand, universe-saving, mythological implications to their existence. Most of his fantasies had been about his birth family, off somewhere in Europe, missing him and keeping a room at their enormous house for him, and setting an extra place at the dinner table in the hopes that he might just walk up and in and become one of them again. 

Half the time, he’d thought of it as a delusion, a thing to lie to himself about over and over until he’d believed it to be true, wool to pull over his eyes so he wouldn’t have to look at the family he’d been saddled with and think _this is it._

But now, those strange dreams feel possible again. If they know that little about themselves, who’s to say that family isn’t out there somewhere?

“How would they even know where to find her?” Diego wonders, interrupting Klaus’s train of thought. 

Klaus frowns. “You think she might’ve been one of us, or one of _them,_ at some point? Before Five’s boss jumped in and plucked her up? I mean, she must’ve _known_ somehow that she had powers. How could she know, unless Lila had a way to use them?”

Diego considers it. 

It’s possible, but changes in the timeline leave traces. They leave echoes of themselves, they leave impressions in the sand, dreams, or the ghosts of dreams. Diego can sense so many things about his life here, even though he hadn’t lived it at all, he can make out the shape of conversations he’d never had, and places he’d never been, and things he’d never done. 

And as hard as he tries, as hard as he thinks of Lila, he just… doesn’t sense anything around her. 

“I don’t know,” he admits. “Either she’s a Sparrow, or she’s something else entirely.”

“You think we’ll ever know?”

Diego shakes his head, staring at the folder, at the list of related files. There’s only _K.O. 743,_ something that had been in Five’s file, something Diego will try digging up later. There’s one more thing that he just isn’t seeing, one more piece in this puzzle that hasn’t fallen into place, and maybe this file is it. 

Klaus takes a step back, angling for the way out. “Let’s read it outside. Let’s go show Allison, come on.”

Diego doesn’t answer. He seems reluctant to leave. 

Klaus has an excellent view of his eyepatch from this angle, now that Diego’s shaggy hair has fallen out of his face. He wonders about how well the healing’s going. The eyeball’s still in there, after all, it’s just very, very out of shape. Diego’s kept the details about it very close to his chest, but he gets the impression that it isn’t turning out so well.

“What’s eating you?” Klaus asks. “The eye, right?”

Diego tenses. 

Klaus is right, is the thing. Aside from the slow, throbbing pain that’s been ebbing and flowing in steady waves that have only just begun to fade, there’s the worry about what it’s done to his powers. Diego doesn’t need true depth perception to hit his targets; he’s known that since he was a kid, when he was sent on missions with an eye swollen shut and he still hit his targets. But it’s the principle of the thing, it’s a reminder that he’s this close to losing his sight for good, and if he loses it, then he’s knocked down to normal. 

And in spite of himself, that old, familiar rage is soaking into him, is bubbling and demanding that Lila be punished somehow, for nearly taking that from him.

“There’s that,” Diego replies. “But…”

“But?”

Diego grimaces, sinking down to sit on the floor. This is a different sort of pain, one that he’d thought scabbed over, but hasn’t at all, and is starting to leak.

“Eudora’s alive,” Diego says. 

Oh, right, that cop, the one that saved him, the one that… died. Or, _almost_ died. 

“Wow,” Klaus replies, thinking back, to that night in the motel. “You’re why she got shot, in the old timeline.”

“I am.” Diego grimaces. 

Klaus tries for levity: “You were pretty far up your own ass, huh?” 

Diego doesn’t even have the strength to glare at him. It’s the truth, more or less. “I… I just _had_ to make it about me. I had to run in, and she told me not to, and I still did it. It’s my fault. So seeing her now is just…”

“Strange?” Klaus crouches down next to him, before splaying his legs out across the ground, digging grooves in the dirt with the backs of his heels. 

“More than strange. She isn’t hurt, she isn’t in the hospital, she’s _alive,_ and she’s going to _stay_ alive. She’s going to be fine, and...” Diego seems to be choking on his words, so Klaus decides to wait for him to cough them out. He just leans his shoulder against Diego’s, to let Diego rest his weight against his, and looks up at the patches of blue and gray and green above them. He listens to the muffled chatter of the birds above them, and he waits. 

“And… it’s _because_ of me,” Diego finally admits. “It’s because I wasn’t here. I never met her, I never dated her, I was never a part of her life. She’s better off without me.”

He’s known it for a long time, but he’s never been able to say it aloud. But now, in doing so, he feels lighter, like he’s released a breath he hadn’t even realized he was holding. 

“Have you ever thought about that? That someone might have been happier or safer if they’d never met you at all?” 

He has. He has a _lot,_ to be honest. 

He’s thought about their family, and about that one waiting for him in Europe, and he’s wondered a lot if they’d have been happier if Dad had never found them, if they’d grown up in different corners of the world, with different families, as different people. 

And ever since that mess in Dallas, the thought’s been lurking in his head for a long, long time, that maybe, if Dave had never met him, he’d have never enlisted, or never ended up in _that_ unit, in _that_ camp, in _that_ battle, in the path of _that_ bullet. That maybe, Dave would have lived, were it not for him.

He’s thought about Ben. And he knows exactly how useful that had ultimately been, in stranding the both of them in a swamp of corrosive guilt that had eaten at them for years upon years until it had nearly consumed them from the inside out. 

Klaus is very, very familiar with guilt, with wondering if he’d stranded himself in a wasteland of his own terrible choices, with imagining some mirror world version of himself who’d been dealt a slightly different hand by life, who’d sprinted so much further with it. 

And he is very, very familiar with the end result of wallowing in it. 

“Let’s not go there,” Klaus decides. 

“Why? You’re not scared, are you?”

“No. Not at all.”

“Then what are you saying?”

“I’m _saying,”_ Klaus replies, “That it doesn’t _matter._ Because we _did_ meet them, and it _did_ happen, and it’s not worth tearing ourselves apart over, especially not now.”

“Well," Diego protests, "Just because she’s alive doesn’t mean that I didn’t do it. I still remember it, Klaus. All those things happened, because I remember them. Because _you_ remember them.”

“No,” Klaus sighs, “You don’t understand. Yeah, it still happened, but it’s fine. It’s over, it’s done, and we can’t just _sit_ here in the mud and fucking pity ourselves forever.” 

“But what if I do it again?” He can feel Diego’s pulse kicking quickly through his arm, is suddenly very, very aware of how close they're sitting. “What if I fuck up, and I get someone else killed? I can’t _do_ that again.”

“You won’t.”

“You don’t know that.”

“Sure I don’t," Klaus says, "The universe has a shit sense of humor, especially with us. But you won’t make that mistake again. I _know_ you won’t. Because you’re not that person anymore. You may not see it, but I do. And so does everyone else. You're better, Diego. So let's get the fuck up, okay? Let's get up, and let's go find Allison, and let's get going.”

Klaus jumps up to his feet, and turns, extending a hand to Diego.

He takes it.

* * *

When Ben climbed into his stolen van and made for the north of the state, for the dense, forested lake preserves and the sleepy vacation cabins scattered among them, he hadn’t gone alone. Luther had chosen to join him, which he wasn’t particularly surprised by, seeing as his rather distinctive silhouette would be difficult to hide in plain sight. Vanya had slipped in quietly with him, which Ben was also expecting, as she’d always been a wallflower, and he had assumed she would respond to their fugitivehood with the same strategy. 

Five had joined them as well, for a time, coolly ousting Ben from the driver’s seat and selecting for them a small vacation cabin that lay empty, deep enough in the woods that they’d at least have some privacy if the owners came calling. By his approximation, it was run down enough that it was clearly not in use regularly, and therefore worth the gamble.

Once settled, Five had begun the habit of blinking back and forth between them and their siblings in New York, briefing each party on the other’s progress, and flicking back and forth between them, and off to places unknown, as it pleased him.

Ben had accepted Five’s flightiness easily; he is off looking for the Sparrows, trying to determine where they were and who they were pursuing, and he’s clearly the best person for the job. Whatever it takes to get them out of this mess, he'll go along with. 

Luther had accepted it indifferently; since their arrival, he’s all but shut down. He’d flopped down on the thin, mostly-decorative couch, knocked the television back into shape, and spent day in and day out parked there, watching trash television and daytime soaps. 

He feels as though his brain has turned to mush, and his limbs to lead; the Umbrella Academy is well and truly over, and they will never go on missions again, and now that there is no world to save, he feels utterly useless. He isn’t sure at all if there’s a place in the world for him anymore, and, knowing painfully well that he had spent his entire life single-mindedly chasing the life of a superhero, now that it has well and truly slammed the door on him, he has found himself adrift, without so much as a paddle. 

And Vanya… well. She’s been a ball of nerves since they’d gotten here, constantly pacing the length of the cabin, looking up into the treetops, expecting a shape to swoop down on them from above. She hasn’t been at ease since they’ve all gone their separate ways. 

He can see the fuse burning, and would like to avoid setting her off too early. He’ll leave that to Five, thank you very much. Even when they were young, Ben’s never been one for defusing frayed nerves; he’s always preferred approaching afterwards, to help make sense of the damage, and that’s what he’ll do here. 

In short, now that they’re finally able to rest, they’re the most restless they’ve ever been. 

The days pass so slowly that it feels like they’re all encased in amber, each in their own private trap of melancholy. 

Ben spends them tucking into the cabin owner’s supply of books, and stave off the urge to curl into the fetal position and shut down completely from the stress of knowing that somewhere out there, a pack of superhumans is in the process of hunting them down. 

Or, from the very different sort of stress that being apart from Klaus is causing; he keeps looking up expecting to see him, keeps feeling a shapeless, formless sort of guilt chasing after him, the thought that he should be looking after him swooping at him like a sharp-taloned bird and making a knot turn in his gut. 

They’re in a complicated place, to say the least, and distance isn’t helping. 

For the life of him, Ben wishes Five would hurry up and figure out how to deal with the Sparrows. They’ve been at large for weeks, and they’ve received no progress, not from Five, not from Diego, and Ben can sense their collective patience wearing thin. 

The phone rings, and Ben’s the one who answers it.

It’s Five, who’s overextended himself, lost his juice, and needs a lift from…

“A racetrack? Five what the hell are you doing at a racetrack? How are horses going to help us?”

“Not horses, Ben. Dogs.”

“Alright. How are dogs going to help us?”

“I happen to have made quite a winning bet--”

“You’re gambling. On dogs.”

“Yes. And I won. And now we’re financed for quite some time. Now are you going to come get me, or shall I walk?”

Ben gets in the car, and drives.

It takes an hour before he gets to where Five had told him to meet, pulling out into the parking lot of Chapman’s, some sort of greyhound racing track. Five’s waiting for him out at the far end of the lot, and he’s finally traded his uniform for civvies, for a suit that doesn’t quite fit him right. 

Five slaps a program into Ben’s lap, when he slides into the front seat.

“Hey Piggy, Mister Wonderful, or Sweet Gravy?”

_“... What?”_

“Which one won?”

Ben stares at the program. “Don’t you already--”

“Humor me.”

“I don’t know, the white one?”

“Wrong,” crows Five. “It was Mister Wonderful.”

“How much did you get?” 

“Couple thousand.” Five pats his fat pockets.

“Great. Anything else bring you here, other than the money?” 

Five considers. 

And honestly, not really. He’s been bouncing all over the state, trying to track the Sparrow Academy’s movements, trying to put his finger on a pattern to their movements, but he just can’t figure it out. They’re always gone by the time he’s found them, and there’s simply no logic to the way they’re traveling, as though they have no plan at all. 

Neither does he. He’d thought of himself as an excellent candidate for the glue that would hold the family together, but he’s realizing that he’s very, very wrong. 

“No,” he answers truthfully, unable to keep the sourness from his voice. 

Ben smartly drops the topic, and they make it most of the way back in silence.

It’s only when they’re driving up the worn, overgrown road to their hideaway that Five speaks next. He’s staring at the program, at the photos of dogs running. “They’re too skinny,” Five mutters. “Like little deer.”

“Yeah, I guess,” Ben shrugs. “I’m not really a dog guy though.”

“No?”

“Nah, I’ve always liked cats better. Dogs are all needy, and cats basically take care of themselves, you know?”

Five shrugs.

Ben thinks it’s a little odd of him, to have said it at all, but he doesn’t have the energy to pursue it any further. They’re finally back, and the woods are deep and green and quiet, and the only thing Ben wants to do is curl up beside Luther and pretend he’s anywhere else. 

Vanya’s waiting for them on the porch, playing with the frayed end of her shirt, staring at the car as it lumbers over that last hill and rolls to a stop below a tree that's bowing under the weight of a flock of strange birds. The wind curling across her face is warm and gentle, but it doesn’t put her at ease. Instead, she’s coiled up like a snake, staring at the both of them like she isn’t sure if she wants to cry in relief that they’re alright, or smack them for leaving again. 

Five pauses for a moment, looking her over carefully. She’s still too thin. The body she’s in had spent about six months at the Hotel, and though she’s weaning it back onto food, the process is taking far slower to take effect than he’d like. She looks narrow and sharp, and the way the shadows have closed in around her face gives her a vaguely skull-like look.

The boredom of waiting for the end of their exile to come, one way or another, is numbing, but it’s given Vanya a great deal of time to think things over. Things like what had happened the last time she’d been in a cabin in the woods, like why she’d clung to Leonard so hard and fast. Things that had gone unanswered for a long time, but have settled like silt in the back of her head, like… “Who’s Delores?”

The words cut like a slashing knife of mercury, and though the blade isn’t aimed at him, Ben decides he’d rather not wait around and get slashed in the crossfire. He slips inside, the corner of the worn screen door flapping behind them, leaving Five and Vanya alone.

Inside, the television sputters. Ben plops down beside Luther on the couch, and the two pretend to watch _Celebrity Surgery._ Dr. Grossman’s talking about his finishing touches to the nine-week surgery process, and Luther is rolling the golden charm around his wrist over and over in his fingers.

And Ben is listening. Not completely, not enough to leave the couch, or lean his ear against the door, but enough to hear the echoes of a fight leak in through the thin wooden walls of the vacation cabin. He can only make out the vague shape of the argument, but for a single line: _"You're just going to_ leave _again, aren't you?"_

Frankly, he’s glad for the lack of detail. Guilt and jealousy and misplaced anger fly like evil spirits outside the window, and fear, fear of _leaving,_ that comes true in a flash, bright as lightning, as Five flies off to cool down elsewhere, to nurse his wounds with his ego.

There's a bang as Vanya slams her bedroom door behind her, loud enough to scare the birds away, and she doesn't come out.

* * *

That night, Vanya dreams.

She knows exactly where she is, when she sees the bright pink walls and the cat fur on the bed.

She’s back in that house again, the house she’d been taken to when she was fourteen, when that villain whose name and face she cannot recall at all had broken into the house and had whisked her away with him. 

Nothing had happened, it must be said. She’d only been taken because the man had panicked, having not accounted for her when he’d broken into the Hargreeves mansion. She and the villain had sat in his living room, and ate and talked as the record player sputtered through Vivaldi's "Four Seasons," and for the first time, Vanya had felt listened to; something told her that he was just as lonely and confused as she was, and therefore, while she wasn't unafraid, she wasn't particularly concerned that he would harm her. 

Then, he’d snatched her by the arm, and hurried her into the back of the house, to a bright pink bedroom with lace doilies and old photographs everywhere, that stank of perfume and cat and old woman, that Vanya had deduced had once belonged to the man’s grandmother. 

He left her there, locking the door behind him, and Vanya had listened to the sound of a scuffle outside, tugging on the tarnished doorknob until it popped off in her hands. The door had been smashed open, and the culprit had been the police, not her family, and Vanya had felt incredibly stupid, for thinking they would come for her, and take her by the hand, and take her home.

Pogo had been waiting in the front of the house with the car, and had taken her home in time for dinner. Vanya had cried the entire drive back, not because she was frightened, but because she hadn’t wanted to leave. No one ever asked about it when she returned. They might not have even noticed she had been taken.

She never mentioned that in her book. It was just for her.

Vanya had run away a month later, if one considers sitting at a bus stop for a few hours, before giving up and going home, as running away. She’d had this idea, that she’d show up at the villain’s hideout, that she’d knock on his door, and he’d smile, calling her so clever for finding her way back to him, taking her in under his cape and revealing that he’d never taken her because he’d panicked, no, he’d _chosen_ her, because he’d only ever been looking for a friend, and now that he’s found her, he’ll move her right in, and they’ll listen to records and garden in the yard, and make velvet capes together and they will never be alone again.

But she’d never seen the villain again. 

She never discussed that in her book either.

Vanya is in that room now, and she can hear the muffled sound of violence breaking out on the other side of the white door, and the knob is in her hand, which is not that of a fourteen-year-old girl, but the calloused, thin one of her twenty-nine-year-old self. 

She’s been staring at the knob for minutes, or maybe hours, or days, or perhaps centuries have rolled by, and there is a fine layer of dust on her head and shoulders, and she is wondering if he even knows who she _is,_ in this world. If they’d met at all, if she’d ever been carried here for oatmeal cookies and soft classical music on the radio, and stilted conversation about cats and music and, of all things, how he had sewn his velvet cape with his grandmother’s machine.

Any moment now, Vanya knows, the door will burst open, and she will be marched out of the house with a tight, unfriendly hand on her shoulder. 

But for now, the door holds, and Vanya isn’t safe (she’s _never_ been safe, she’ll never _be_ safe), but she’s guarded, as she waits to be taken out to Pogo, as she waits to never see the villain again. 

_Maybe I don’t have to, though,_ she thinks. _This time, I have my power._

She imagines it, bursting out into the old hallway, snatching the officers by the heartbeat and shaking them until they explode from the inside out and paint the walls red, a fitting punishment for daring to interrupt her.

She decides she will do it.

Vanya reattaches the knob to the door, hearing a little click somewhere within the wood, as she turns it carefully.

The door creaks in protest, but Vanya keeps pressing, until it’s all the way open, until she’s stepped out.

She isn’t in the narrow old hallway, with its peeling wallpaper. 

All around her, it’s dark, black as an oil spill, and her thoughts rock dizzily in the darkness as she turns, and finds that the door is simply floating in space, a rectangle of pink disconnected from everything. It’s as though her entire universe had shrunk to that room, and now that she’s outside of it, she’s nowhere at all. 

But she can still hear the sounds of a scuffle, of a familiar reedy voice hissing at the man who might have been Vanya’s friend, if she’d only had more time to know him. 

Vanya knows that she has to find the fight, has to reach out with her powers and implode the person standing in her way, but the dark is sticky, making her feet cling to the ground.

There’s a spot in the darkness, darker than everything around it, like a clot in the night’s blood, and Vanya stops. 

It’s moving towards her, stepping into the shaft of light from the only room in the universe, revealing itself to be a woman, with smooth, dark skin and a bright orange-rimmed domino mask concealing her eyes. Her long banded ponytail flicks like a whip behind her, and her skirt swishes as she walks. Vanya’s never seen her before, and the woman hasn’t introduced herself, but somehow, Vanya knows instantly that her name is Carla. 

For a fraction of a second, Vanya thinks Carla is frowning at her, as if she hadn’t been supposed to open the door, but she’s probably not seeing things clearly, because the woman greets her with a brilliant smile.

She opens her arms wide, and throws them around Vanya’s torso, pulling her into a tight, warm embrace, cooing, “Oh, Vanya! I’ve found you!” She has a high, soft voice, with an accent that makes her words have a musical cadence. Vanya’s heart flutters a bit, at the sound, and she brings her hands up, to fold them around her back.

“Don’t worry,” Carla is saying, “You’re safe now.”

“No. No, it’s not true.” Vanya says, her words spilling over each other, nearly slurring. She tries to look over Carla's shoulder, into the dark, to make out the shape of the hallway, but there's still nothing.

“Sure it is.”

And then it _is._ Then the gnawing, buzzing anxiety in Vanya’s chest lifts away, and she is warm all over, and the hallway is in front of her. She has nothing to fear. Why would she ever be afraid? Why had she ever thought she was alone in the dark, when it's four in the afternoon, and the sun's streaming through the window?

“How do you…” Vanya blinks. Her tongue feels so heavy in her mouth. “How?”

“Because I said so.” Carla pulls back, reaching down to hold Vanya’s face in her gloved hands. “Because you’re with me. See? I came. I didn’t forget you. Why would I ever do that?”

At her words, Vanya is flooded with a drowsy feeling, drunk on the thought that she must belong somewhere, that she belongs with… the cloud over her head is making things clearer now, now she _sees:_ she and Carla are old, old friends. 

“Come home,” Carla whispers, leaning in, close enough to kiss, and Vanya can’t stop staring at her red, red mouth. “Please, Vanya, we all want you to come home.”

Vanya’s breath catches. It’s so _nice_ to be wanted, so she tilts her head, and…

And then she is in a different sort of darkness, one that it takes her a very long time to realize is gray-tinted and structured, the darkness of a bedroom with all the lights off. 

It takes Vanya a very long time to realize that she is lying in her bed, that it had been only a dream.

She isn’t used to dreaming; from the age of four to only a few weeks ago, she’d had none at all, so the ones she’s had since have all been especially vivid, prone to making her kick fitfully and stare at the wall, unable to sort real from unreal. This dream is no exception. It grows in her skull like a troublesome vine, digging its roots deep in her, and refusing to let go.

Vanya lays there for a while, listening to the rattle of the pines outside her window, to the electronic buzz of the television, and the hushed conversation of her brothers. She stares at the door, at the thin golden crack of light shining through the side. She knows, vaguely, that she should pull herself up from under the blankets, rub her sticky eyes and go out to them, but the door is a thousand miles away and it'd be so, so easy to just...

She turns over, and falls back asleep.

* * *

In the weeks since her mother’s murder, Lila has not felt happy once.

She still isn’t, to be honest. But if happiness is at the end of this path she’s walking, then she’s sure she’s taken another massive step towards it. 

When she’d presented herself to the Sparrow Academy, they had accepted her, taking her and folding her neatly into the center of them, and in the weeks since, Lila has learned them. She’d taken years of Commission analysis training and applied it well, studying the Sparrows as well as she can. 

She’s learned a lot.

She’s learned that One may lead them, but he is too hesitant, too cautious, and so it often falls to Two to command the group in his stead, which she does with a ruthless efficiency that Lila is certain would have made her quite popular at the Commission. She’s learned that Reginald Hargreeves, that most elusive of figures she’s heard so much about, who casts such a long, dark shadow, seems to prefer his Number Ones to be men with meat for brains whose only function is mindlessly beating things up. 

She’s learned that Three is as flighty as her power would imply, the least interested in hunting down the Umbrella Academy, who’d much rather just coast along a nice breeze for a while, or preen her feathers, or whisk her straight black hair up in its tight little bun again and again, to make sure not a single strand falls loose. She's been gone a lot, but now she's back, and is delighting in teaching Lila to fly.

She’s learned that Four is chomping at the bit, to get started on the Umbrella Academy, to get rid of them, to win the grand game their father had set them upon. She, Lila decides, is her favorite of the bunch, with a wonderfully destructive power that she practices on empty cans and bottles and the occasional tree trunk.

She’s learned that Six is nearly as cocky as she is, that he knows a dozen ways to make a person hurt, and that he’s a surprisingly good sport about Lila practicing his power on him. She gets the sense that he’s never actually hurt before, not like she has. 

She’s learned little about Carla; she’s always sleeping, or quietly conversing with her siblings, just out of earshot. She gets the sense that the rest of them are just a tad protective of her, that they’re making a conscious effort in the patterns in which they approach Lila and engage her, to keep her apart from their sister. But that’s fine, as they’ll be working together long enough, and she’s sure that it’s only an eventuality that they’ll end up talking properly.

And besides, dreams are a boring power anyway. She’d much rather blow something up with an eyebeam, or go flying up and up and up above the clouds in a way that only Three can. Really, the reconnaissance potential is practically endless for a thing as mundane as turning into a flock of birds. 

They’ve taken her in, and allowed her to tag along on this strangely slow pursuit of the Umbrella Academy, but Lila is not naive; she can tell that she’s not truly one of them, but a respected guest. 

This, she is sure, is temporary. The Sparrows have told her about their mission, and their father, who may well have hung the moon, from the way they drool over him. They’ve told her, not aloud, but through their mere presence, a lot more than that. Lila has her power to thank, for her insights, for filling in those great gaps between their stony silence and those moments of interest that come most often when Lila is showing off her power, flicking back and forth between their abilities as though she were rolling the cylinder of a revolver, switching from chamber to chamber. 

When these people Lila can mimic slip out of reach, she retains her knowledge of their powers, and the feeling of having used them, but she cannot use the powers themselves. Though, silver lining: finding those familiar powers after a separation is akin to sliding into a pair of well-worn boots that have molded to your feet. 

But now, Lila finally has a full surplus of powers to choose from, and she feels like she can finally relax, knowing that they won’t slip from her sphere of influence, because the Sparrows simply would not pick up and abandon her. She can finally _learn_ them, finally practice and play with them and pick them apart to look at their insides and guess how they work, the way she would with the birds on the Commission grounds when she was little. 

And the Sparrows, so much greater than the Umbrella Academy, are not threatened by her gifts. Rather, they _delight_ in them. In fact, they insist upon her using them, and she is quite certain that her ability is the reason why she has been swept up among them so quickly; she is so very good at sensing what they want, and they must know that, they must know that she can be that very thing. 

The powers don’t crowd in her anymore; they’re massive, and pressing at the edges of her, but she feels better able to carry that weight, to negotiate it, now that she knows that someone is excited to help her learn it. 

Even those extra bits that she never wants, that always seem to find her, are more tolerable. 

She is talking to Six, and suddenly finds that her accent is slipping into Norwegian instead of the British one Mother had coached her to maintain because she’d found it aesthetically pleasing, and strangely, she doesn’t feel the urge to gnaw on her tongue until she loses it.

She is sparring with Four, and is suddenly keenly aware of why she favors one foot over the other, of the slip and fall down a ravine that had led to a broken leg so severe that it had never healed quite perfectly. And the ghost of that pain does not make her shriek and scream and claw at her calf; she just takes it into her and keeps moving.

She is flying, truly _flying,_ with Three, and she looks down with her dozens of eyes, and for a split second, she is not observing a smooth mirror-like lake below her, but the rugged slope of a mountain she does not recognize. And the memory does not terrify her, but exhilarates her; she cannot be lost in time or space, not with a guide who might explain that very sensation to her flying beside her. 

She is tagging along after One and Two, who are mostly indifferent to her, and she suddenly feels her stomach flutter with the wings of a dozen butterflies, and she thinks, _oh, that’s_ love, _isn’t it?_ Having never felt it before, the sensation is utterly foreign, and it leaves her lips curled up stupidly, a pleasantly warm feeling swelling in her chest. 

She doesn’t feel that visceral sense of wrongness, at the invasion of those strange thoughts and memories and sensations into her body. These people aren’t the Umbrella Academy; they’d done nothing to her, and so she finds herself far more accepting of their presence in her mind. And what’s more, there’s something else, something warm and certain that has seeped into her skull and soaked through her brain.

Having never felt it before, Lila’s puzzled by it for a while. But then, when she sees the lot of them all curled up together, sleeping in a pile like puppies, she gets it: it’s a sense of camaraderie, of belonging, of absolute trust. 

No wonder she’s so confused by it. It’s something she’s never had.

It’s a feeling that isn’t extended to her; though the Sparrows have been forthcoming enough in their reception to her powers, and in allowing her to experiment with theirs, and though they’ve been content to allow her to trail after them in their wanderings across the state, she is very aware that she isn’t one of them yet. 

She feels, quite distinctly, as though she is sitting in the dark on the outside of a brightly-lit window, within which she can see the six of them together, indulging in one another’s company. She cannot breathe at all outside, but there is air within that room, and it can be hers if only she finds a way to open it, if only she finds a way to persuade one of the people inside to walk over and unlock it, so she might climb in. 

Lila is used to playing dress-up with different personalities, adopting new mannerisms and affects and emotions in order to get close to her marks. She is used to working with strange bedfellows to accomplish her missions. But this is different in a way she hadn’t expected. 

She isn’t faking at _all._ Their powers and their language are contagious, and so, it seems, are their emotions. So when Lila feels that warm, familiar intimacy lapping at her like the shore of a warm ocean, she feels herself thaw to it, and she lets it in.

Suddenly, it doesn’t really matter, that Mother and the Commission have been burned. It feels like it happened a long, long time ago, in another life, in a dream of another life, to another Lila. 

It doesn’t matter, if she cannot keep any of their powers, or if every now and again, an invasive thought that isn’t hers comes bouncing back from the depths of her mind, because her mind is crowded all the time now, and this noise is warm and wonderful and hungry for her, and these people would never abandon her and leave her powerless. 

_Yes,_ she realizes one night, when she’s watching them all curl up together on the opposite end of the motel room. _This is something I might even want._

The next morning, she paints her nails coral-red, to content herself with the lack of a uniform they have for her. She’ll get one soon enough, she’s sure. 

Lila runs her fingers along her forearm, feeling the little pellet still embedded there. No one will be using it to find her, so it is only for her, an empty promise nestled between her muscles, a useless little hunk of glass and metal that marks her people as all dead and gone, a way to remember them by. 

She’s keeping it, but she doesn’t see why she can’t have something else too. She doesn’t see why, after the Umbrella Academy is dead and gone, she can’t have a life of her own. 

She’ll cover it with a tattoo soon.

She’s certain that they want it too; one of the sensations that has been prickling along the back of her spine, a feeling that is not her own, but one she’d caught like an illness, is that they are waiting for someone. That they are incomplete, and that they’ve known this their whole lives, and have been preparing to fill the ranks of their family for a long, long time. That they are an organism, missing a heart. 

Lila doesn’t know how to be a heart, let alone how to have one. But maybe, she can try. Maybe, she can be the Number Seven they want so badly.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Another one of these chapters I'm never gonna be pleased with. I really do hate writing transition chapters.
> 
> Sparrow Notes: Since we have zero canon info about how they behave, I figured I'd use them as a contrast to the UA, inverting as many of their personalities as I could, as well as some of their relationships (One and Two being a couple was intended as a reversal of Luther and Diego's former rivalry), and their team dynamic- the UA are only just learning how to work together, whereas the Sparrows are so codependent they can't bear to be separated. Also they're probably all one big poly configuration.
> 
> On Grace: Since there's basically zero info on exactly who or what that cube is, I went with what I had, which is 'that's Grace.' It worked... disturbingly well.


	3. ran to the devil

They’re in the woods, surrounded by high, ragged walls of pine that let only streaks of light through to the forest floor, which is carpeted with bright orange pine needles. A few filaments of watery sunlight stroke her face, so Vanya shifts her head from where it’s laying in Carla’s lap. 

Carla had found her here, or... _had_ she? The more she thinks, Vanya comes to realize that she cannot recall how she had come to be in the forest, or how she had encountered her strange new friend, only that she is here now, and that her head is splayed across Carla’s perfect plaited skirt, and Carla’s smart fingers are combing gently through her hair, and that she has been babbling about her troubles to her. 

“I simply cannot understand,” Carla says, tossing her braid over her shoulder with a contemptuous shrug, “How you could stay with them, after they’ve hurt you so terribly.”

Vanya nods quietly, feeling a little guilty, about how quickly she’d gone and spilled all her worries out at once. She simply couldn’t help it, couldn’t stop all her worries-- about her family stranding her on the outside again, about Five and that woman he’s so cagey about discussing and how he keeps _leaving,_ about being left _alone_ again--from babbling up and spilling over, like water flowing over the brim of a basin.

She does this, she knows. The few times she’d been able to charm someone well enough for them to bother spending time with her, she’d always ruined it. Those few classmates who’d gone to lunch with her during college, her roommates, the handsome cello from the orchestra... they’d always, always realized they’d bitten off more than they could chew, when she’d talk and talk and talk for hours, trying to cram every secret and worry down their throats before they vanished on her.

Which, well. Maybe the reason why they vanished on her was that she tried to drown them in her worries. But it could never have been helped. She’d always been so hungry, for someone to listen, for someone to care. She’d been wanting for a confidant for years, and so desperate for one that she saw fit to remake him in everyone who so much as gave her a second glance.

Her new friend probably thinks she’s stupid now, thinks she isn’t worth the trouble of befriending. But if she does, she doesn’t let it on. She hadn’t objected when they’d seen each other yesterday, or the day before that, or the day before that. She hadn’t rolled her eyes when Vanya had stopped showing off her power to make the mountains crumble into dust with the sound of a thunderstorm, to worry about what would happen when the money ran out, if the police came, if there comes a day when Five doesn’t come back at all…

“Of course, I understand it,” Carla says, cutting smoothly through her train of thought. “You have nowhere else to go. Don’t fret, Vanya, I could never hate you for something you cannot help. You deserve to be safe.”

“But there’s nowhere that’s _safe,”_ Vanya murmurs. 

“You should have so much more than that, though,” Carla interjects. “You should have a life with someone who would never hurt you so, who would never leave you.”

They’re nice words. But Vanya’s heard them before, from a different mouth, only a short few months ago. And that had ended in Vanya, skewering the man who had been her lover with a storm of knives and horrible sharp things. The memory is enough to make her gut clench, and she roots that sense of discomfort deep within her, keeping a firm hand on it even as her mind turns, strangely, to the warm, shiny image of a life free from the wandering eyes and relentless noise of the city, to a life with four sisters instead of one, and two brothers instead of four...

“Wouldn’t that be nice?” Carla says, and Vanya has no idea how she knows what she’s thinking.

And it would be. It _would_ be nice.

But that doesn’t mean it would be _good._

Vanya's family has hurt her, but she loves them anyway. And she has hurt them too, but they love her anyway. They've fought for this wonderful bond they're beginning, they've traveled across space and time for it, and it just... doesn't feel _right,_ to throw it all away. Her family is not nice, and she is not nice, and so of _course_ they are not nice. They will never be nice, but that does not mean they cannot be good. She feels the slightest flash of anger, at the idea that someone would want to whittle away what they've fought for, until it's pleasing to the eye and fits in a category to which it had never belonged in the first place.

... Maybe she should go. 

Vanya lifts her head, and Carla catches the sides of her face in her hands again, tracing the shape of her jawline with curious fingers. Vanya accepts it with a strange twisted mix of emotions; tenderness, intermingled with terror. It’s a familiar feeling, one she’d felt when she’d been off with Leonard, and she is struck with a wave of humiliation from somewhere she cannot identify, apart from it not seeming to come from within her.

But it doesn't matter where the feeling comes from, because the feeling is _here._ She feels very silly, for thinking of Carla in such a way. She is just a wisp of a dream, whipped up by her imagination to make her happy. 

So Vanya decides to give in to the bright, warm feeling that laps at her like a lazy wave would a shoreline. She will be happy, or she will pretend to be, because being miserable might scare her away. And she'd rather be a little bit afraid than alone.

Vanya sits up, traces the back of Carla’s head with her fingertips, and pulls her in for a kiss. 

She isn’t sure, totally, why she’s doing this. She isn’t sure if she’s doing it because she wants to-- and a part of her _does_ want to, a part of her finds Carla frighteningly beautiful, and wants to feel that mouth, large and red and soft as a rose, tracing over her skin-- or because she feels like she needs to do something to make up for not being able to look up at Carla and say _yes._

So she says “yes” to something else, instead.

She wakes as she has for a month now: late, to the watery afternoon light crumpled over her sheets, with an ache in her belly and a feverish daze in her head.

It takes her an hour to find the strength to leave the warm weight of the blankets atop her, to roll out of bed, to wander out into the kitchen and see if anything’s changed, if the world’s ending again. She’s overslept, and it’s halfway through the afternoon; she’s been oversleeping so much, but she seems to wake up more and more fatigued. 

Vanya feels embarrassed, that the days are slipping like sand through her fingers, and she isn’t sure at all how it has come to this. She has always been full of anxiety for all the wrong things, but lately, it seems as though all her emotions have been scraped out of her skull, like she needs to wrap herself in the heavy weight of bathrobes and blankets to keep herself from lifting off and floating away into the sky. She’s tired, and she’s scared, and she needs someone to tell her things will be alright, but no one does. 

She feels like a walking corpse, shuffling through the house, staring at the meager things Ben and Five had gotten them to eat, as she rubs the sole of her socked foot over the bare wood where the linoleum has peeled away. She isn’t hungry, even though she should be, so she sighs, and abandons the food where it is.

Vanya looks around for her brothers and finds them by the sounds they leave off: the hum of the television, signifying Luther, and the sharp sounds of an argument somewhere outside, signifying Ben and Five. 

Hearing the sharp, reedy voice of the latter, she feels her face heat up, and she dips her head, to guide her hair out from behind her ear and let it fall down into her face. It’s grown, not much, but enough to fall just past her chin now, enough to hide behind.

She almost wants to go out, past the screen door, to see them, to smell the green air, to listen to the soft pattering of the rain as it splats against the leaves. But she’s averse to that now; a part of her’s terrified that if she so much as opens the door, she’ll invite the Sparrows down on their heads, or else the trees will fall and shatter the cabin. 

Instead, she stays right where she is, listening to her brothers, keenly aware that she is behaving strangely. 

_I’m right here,_ she thinks, crying out from somewhere deep within her. _Notice me, please,_ please, _notice that something is not right with me. Look at me, and ask me if I’m okay, and when I say I am, call me on my lie._

No one does. 

Vanya looks back at her bed. It’s easier, to crawl in, and pull the blankets over her head, and fold a pillow against her back, and pretend that someone is holding her. So she does, and as she does so, she considers, again, that fantasy of a new family, a family that had never hurt her, that had never left her alone.

So she does, closing her eyes and opening them in a stretch of twisted trees that is reassuringly familiar to her, a scene they'd driven past on their way to their hideaway. There is a high, narrow stump here, like a natural stool, and she sits upon it, watching the sunlight play through the leaves and waiting patiently for her friend to come to her. 

Because this is a dream, Vanya waits patiently, and she doesn't have to wait long before her confidante returns to her. 

“Yes,” Vanya says, when Carla sees her next, and poses the same question. “I would like that very much.” 

* * *

Klaus finds Allison lying on her back in the middle of the overgrown lawn, paging dispassionately through a fashion magazine that’s several months old. 

“Hey,” he calls out, and she perks up, her thunderhead of hair bouncing with her. He likes the leftover streaks of purple in it, the ones she keeps tugging at crossly, the ones that remind him of stripes of lightning. But he gets the sense she won’t appreciate it if he tells her that she should feel better about her hair. 

Allison doesn’t greet him when he slides down next to her, his bare feet tickling as they skid through the grass. She’s been quiet lately, been prone to going on long, spiraling walks around the wreckage, disappearing into the woods and coming back just as grave and silent as when she’d entered. She’d been going to some faraway place deep in her head, and judging by how she hasn’t been tracking her eyes across the page she’s on, he gets the sense that she’s heading there now too.

Klaus snatches her magazine by the middle and wrenches it away from her. She reaches back for it, glaring, but he tosses it. They watch it flap like a strange bird in the wind, before it splays wide across the ground, far enough away that neither feels inclined to crawl off the ground, and retrieve it.

“What was that for?” Allison asks dully. 

Klaus frowns. He was hoping for annoyance, or even anger.

“Alright,” he says, “What is it?”

Allison’s mouth tightens.

But she doesn’t feel the need to lie to him. Why would she? What would be the _point_ in it?

Allison had been ruminating on it for months now: Claire is gone. She exists only in Allison’s mind now, and in her heart, and there is nothing in the world that can bring her back. This is a pain she’s going to carry for the rest of her life, one that may fade with time, but will never truly leave her. 

She’s been thinking it over, and she’s been figuring out where she’s going to go from here.

And maybe it’s early, to be deciding this. But isn’t that the idea? That there’s never a Right Time etched into the universe, just waiting to present itself the second you’ve bought that house, or met that person, or saw that special cloud in the sky? Isn’t that the point, that you decide to go for it, if you’re lucky enough to be able to decide at all?

Allison had never planned to have Claire, but when she had, she’d felt a tidal shift within her, something long-forgotten-- something she’d _had_ to forget in order to survive the home she’d been brought into when she was young-- suddenly surging up from the depths of her subconscious. It's something she's wanted, something she's always wanted, and with miles and years between her and her father, she had finally allowed herself to indulge that secret desire. 

Allison hadn’t wanted Claire at first, but she has always wanted to be a mother. 

She’d made a mess of it. Of her. She’d made such a mess that after a point, her baby hadn’t even been her baby anymore, but a walking, talking automaton of a child she’d play house with when it suited her. 

But she’s learned. She understands now, the harm she’s done to her child. She understands why she had done it. And she knows without a shadow of a doubt that she has learned from it. She’s taken herself to the woodshed for it, and she knows, deep in her gut, that if she were to wake up, with Claire in her arms, she would do it all differently.

And she wants to. She wants to do it all differently. 

“I want a baby.”

She wants to try again. She wants to have a baby, and she knows exactly who she wants to have it with.

Klaus blinks. “Oh.” Well, _this_ got heavy. “Like… right _now?_ I mean, I’ll do it, you know, it might actually be kinda fun… But I don’t know how Luther’s gonna--”

Allison glares venomously.

“Joking.” Klaus brings his hands into the air. “I’m totally joking.”

She rolls her eyes. 

But he’s won. He’s gotten Annoyed Allison back, and he prefers her to Sad, Listless Allison any day. 

They’re quiet for a while, staring up at the heavy clouds, so close that the sky seems to be only a few feet above their heads. The golden edge of evening is bubbling at the edges of the clouds like fine champagne, dyeing them lilac. Allison is playing with her strange, crooked hand, and it’s one of those things that makes Klaus always pause and think, _oh yeah, different world._ A different world, where they’d never had their own lives, where Allison never had her child, where Klaus...

“I wonder if _I_ have a kid,” Klaus says, after a moment. 

“...You’ve been with women?”

“Oh, yeah. I mean, I have a _preference._ You know that. But I’ve been with lots of women. You know, the Number Four thing? They eat that shit up. When I first got out of the house, let me tell you, I _collected_ them. I didn’t have to pay rent my whole first year out.”

It conjures up some very specific imagery in Allison’s mind, which she does not appreciate.

“Oh. Well, I didn’t know _that.”_

“Wasn’t any of your business.” 

Allison shrugs. 

“Unless,” Klaus wiggles his eyebrows, “You want to be one of them?”

Allison scoffs amusedly, smacking his shoulder lightly. “Maybe if I’m drunk enough.”

“Noted. I’ll put in an order for Five. You like whiskey, right?”

She doesn’t respond. She’s too busy considering what he’s said. A preference. Maybe that explains a few of her own dalliances, then, those times during parties where she’d sidle up to a few lovely actresses and press her lips into their necks, and tug them home in her limousine to spend the night in her bed. 

She voices this, to Klaus, who nods sagely. “It wasn’t real, though,” she says. “I wasn’t… I didn’t…” _Ask permission,_ she keeps wanting to say, but she keeps choking on the words. Thinking about the person she’d been makes her sick.

“All sex is real,” he replies.

They decide to leave it at that. They’ve been digging, and now they’ve just struck the coffin, and neither is quite ready to pry it open and face what’s inside. Maybe it’s best to leave some things where they lay.

“You don’t think you _do_ have a kid though, do you?” Allison imagines some anonymous hookup turning up at their father’s doorstep with Klaus Junior strapped to her front. Maybe it’s happened already, and they simply have no idea of knowing.

Klaus laughs, clamping an arm around her shoulders. “God, I hope not. Can you imagine _me,_ with a kid? That poor little shit’d kill me by the end of the week.” 

Allison smiles, at the image, then stiffens, tugging out of Klaus’s embrace. He looks up, at where she’s staring.

Diego’s making his way to them, grim-faced. 

“Five’s back,” he says. “He has a dog.”

“What?” groans Klaus.

 _“What?”_ Allison springs up, and goes striding off towards the campfire.

Once she’s a distant blot of gray and brown through the green, Diego plops down beside Klaus. 

“There’s not… a literal dog, right?”

“There’s a literal dog.”

“Oh.” Klaus shrugs. “I mean, sure. Great. Whatever.”

“Not a dog guy?”

Klaus recalls the particularly fun incident that had soured him to dogs, in which he’d sprinted, nineteen and high as a kite, down an alley with a pair of furious German Shepherds snatching the seat off his pants. “Not really? I mean, if Five had a cat, or one of those cool parrots, the ones that are as smart as grade schoolers? _That,_ I’d understand.”

Diego hums in agreement. Not with the parrots, though, he can’t imagine a single thing more annoying than a bright, Technicolor bird squawking in singsong.

They sit, watching the sunset dye the clouds pink, then orange, then red.

“So,” Klaus says. “What was in that file? The one you were looking for. You find it yet?”

“Oh,” Diego recalls, rubbing the crick in his neck caused by hours and hours of squinting in dim light, buried up to his neck in a labyrinth of filing cabinets. Detective work is a lot more boring than a lot of people give it credit for. “Yeah. Today, actually. I was going to tell you all but then…” He waves a hand. “Five and that dog.”

“What’s it say?”

“That Five killed Lila’s parents.”

Klaus blinks. “Why would he do that? Besides his being Five, and all.”

“Because he was told to,” Diego says, and Klaus nods understandingly. The both of them understand a thing or two about that, about being pointed like a weapon at a person and told, _kill them as creatively and messily as you can._ They do not begrudge him it.

“Well, what’s so important about her parents? Do they mess up a timeline, or something? They were killed for a reason, right?”

Diego tilts his head. He hadn’t considered the question, to be honest, but he should have. “My best guess is that they might have wanted to get _her_ specifically, seeing as they took her with them when they left. Maybe Lila would’ve been someone important, someone who makes something happen.”

“Maybe she causes the apocalypse.”

“Really? Are we still on that?”

“I mean, it’s a thought, right? Maybe they wanted _our_ apocalypse for some reason. Maybe it’s more aesthetically pleasing. I mean, blowing up the Moon? That looks great, right?”

Diego glances up at the washed-out sky, at where he guesses the Moon is hiding behind a veil of clouds. “Sure.” 

“It looked great. I think we’re far enough away from it, being in a different timeline and all, where we can at least acknowledge that it looked great.” 

Diego scoffs, leaning back in the grass. He can tell that Klaus is fronting again, and he decides to let him have it. He’s had a lot of awful dreams about the Moon too. 

He brings a hand up to his face, and feels at the peeling corner of the bandage covering his eye. “Here,” Klaus says, leaning over, to help him pull it off. He’s glad to have something to do, whether it’s being the world’s worst nurse, or sloshing through muck, tracking down old typewritten files on their family’s new archenemy. Honestly, even though he doesn’t like it here at all, he’s grateful for it, for the separation, for the opportunity to wander around and be with himself, to separate Klaus-and-Ben so they can become _Klaus and Ben._ And he has Diego to thank for that, for pulling him out of his ass and giving him something to focus on. 

Diego cringes at the sticky peel of the adhesive from his skin, but he allows it. 

“Can you see?”

Diego looks around, grimacing. Half his vision is a blur of color so fuzzy, he can’t make out a single detail. “Not really. How does it look?”

Klaus tosses the bandage aside, wiping his hands off on his pants. He looks at the eye, which has mostly healed over now, into a milky ball of gelatinous tissue. The pupil barely engorges when he leans in, close enough to feel the heat of Diego’s breath. 

“Not great,” he admits.

“Fuck.” Diego runs his hand through his hair, which is getting far too long for his taste. But at least it doesn’t hurt anymore. The cloud of pain obstructing his thoughts has cleared up, slowly over the last few weeks. It’s easier to think now, about what’s to be done with Lila. 

_Right,_ he thinks. _Lila._ He isn’t angry at her anymore. He can’t be, after reading what he had, after spending a few months wandering through the wreckage of the place that had been her home, a home he and his family had destroyed themselves. 

“She’s out there somewhere,” he says. 

“Lila?”

“Yeah. And she’ll be looking for us.”

Klaus sighs, leaning in and resting his head against Diego’s shoulder. Diego goes stiff beneath him, then settles. “A lot of people sure do want us dead. What’ll we do, when she finds us again?”

Because it’s a given, that she’ll find them again. She’d tracked them across time, across timelines, to the moon and probably back again. It isn’t a question of _if,_ but _when,_ and it’s been far too quiet these past few months. Honestly, Klaus would be relieved if she’d showed up, if only because then he’d know what to _do._

Diego simply shrugs. If Klaus had asked him a month ago, he’d have said _kill her_ without any hesitation, but now he just… doesn’t feel that way. They could do it, he’s sure; they could kill her, and they’d be done with it, but it feels like it would be a waste, knowing what he knows. 

He looks up at a gap forming in the clouds, where the Moon’s pale face is peeking through tentatively, as if Vanya’s going to slash at it with a ray of sonic energy and send it bearing down on them again. 

Vanya.

Thinking of her, he knows exactly what to do with Lila.

“We help her?”

“What?” 

“It’s like…” Diego reaches for the words. “It’s like it was with Vanya.”

They’re so alike, he realizes, feeling like an idiot for not thinking of it sooner. She’d been a lot like Lila, not even that long ago. All alone, and a little mad, with all the power in the world, and enough anger to destroy it, and all the people who could have helped her with it had denied her of it. 

“We helped her, didn’t we?” Diego says. If Vanya, in the span of mere months, can go from destroyer of worlds to quiet, loving sister, growing into herself, well… “Maybe we can do the same for Lila.” He feels lighter, admitting it, like a space in him that's been filled with anger and violence has hollowed out completely, is fresh and ready for something new to take its place. 

Klaus shifts, smiling at him. It's astonishing, how _different_ he's become in so short a time. 

“Assuming she doesn’t kill us.”

“Assuming she doesn’t kill us,” Diego parrots.

They laugh, but it echoes away from them, across the empty overgrown campus, and they let it go.

They’re quiet for a moment, very aware of the weight of each other, as the evening chill seeps up from the ground, through the grass, and into the air, listening to night birds whoop somewhere in the ragged shadows of tree beyond them. The sun isn't quite gone below the horizon yet; spring has begun rolling lazily into summer, and so the sunsets last long and long.

“When will all of this be over?” Klaus wonders, keeping the definition of _over_ vague, for fear of pissing the universe off, and defining it as _when you’re all dead._ It doesn’t stop either of them from thinking of it, of curling up in their tent with Allison, only to wake up above their bodies, cloaked in blue, realizing that Lila or the Sparrows, or some agent of a shadowy government organization had slipped into their camp while they’d slept and handled them the way they used to handle their father’s enemies. Neither of them are optimists; they know better, but oh, wouldn't it be _wonderful,_ if things would work out for once?

“I don’t know. Not long, I think.” A part of Diego wants it to just end already, to be done with the uncertainty. A part of him wants them to stay here forever, to settle in to the quiet monotony of living away from any prying eyes, cracking open cans and telling old stories about when they were young, pretending they're the only people in the world. Hell, maybe Five can finally find the right time to bring the rest of the family in, and they can all disappear together.

“You said that yesterday. And the day before that. And the day before that.”

Diego snorts. 

He can feel his hand, creeping across the grass, towards Klaus’s, can feel those slender, cold fingers tangling with his own, and a part of him wonders what Ben would think, if he could see them like this. 

He finds that he doesn’t care at all. He finds that he wants Ben here with them too, and he isn't sure why he's thinking that at all. 

“Can’t we just stay like this?” he asks, meaning a hundred things at once.

Klaus doesn’t answer, but he tightens his grip on Diego’s hand. He's sensing the weight of something deep in his chest falling perfectly into place, something that had been there all along and had never gotten the opportunity to present itself until now, when they're alone and together and unburdened by the weight of the ghosts that had weighed them down for so many years, pleasantly or otherwise. And somehow, he can tell that the feeling is mutual.

* * *

Five did this for entirely practical reasons.

The fact is that the family needs to be protected. Each and every one of his siblings needs to be guarded, needs to be _cared for,_ and if Five is not present to look after them, then he needs to know that someone else will, someone who would never betray them, never abandon them, never drive a wedge between them, someone whose loyalty is absolute and whose instincts are as sharp as Five's own.

And beyond that, the apocalypse is over, and so is the Commission, and Five needs a new hobby, a new project to work towards. If he has nothing at all, he’ll start to lose it, the way the rest of them have, the way he’s starting to; he can feel himself starting to come apart at the seams from the weight of bouncing back and forth across great distances every day, from constantly watching for threats, and he needs to focus himself now, before he goes on a bender the likes of which had nearly cost his family their lives back in Dallas. 

And… well. If Five’s honest, which, to most people, he would rather not be, it’s also that he needs to learn how to care for something. Loneliness is a condition of his nature; he isn’t quite sure what to do with himself without it, and he’s certain that it’s to blame for so many of his sharper edges. Maybe spending some time with someone who can’t ever hate him, no matter what he does, will sand them down just enough to stop cutting the people he cares about.

Hence, the little tan bundle in his arms, squirming as Five leans against the wall and brings him up to lap at his face. Five allows it; he's already given the family's newest addition the pep talk about what it means to join the Hargreeves family, and what his duties will consist of, once he's finished growing into his oversized paws. 

Ben walks into the living room, and takes a full minute for him to realize what is wrapped in Five’s soiled suit jacket. When he does, he whips his head around so fast that he practically gets whiplash. His feathery hair flips down into his face, and he swipes it away annoyedly.

“What’s _that?”_

Five glances down, at the puppy lapping at his fingers. “A dog.”

“How did you get a dog?” Ben blinks. “Wait, did you steal it from that racetrack?”

“No,” Five says. The dogs at the racetrack were far too spindly, far too flighty for his liking. He’d decided that his pet of choice would have to be substantive, hardy, something he can put to work, something he knows can do some damage when he sics it on an enemy, something that will grow so large and strong that it’ll deter any intruders just with a single booming bark. “I went to a breeder and chose one.”

“... Did you _pay_ for it?”

“With what money? I gave it all to you.”

“Oh my God,” Ben sighs.

“What?” asks Luther, who seems to have awoken from his doze on the couch.

“Five just committed grand theft canine.”

“What?” Luther repeats, pushing himself to a seated position and glancing over the back of the couch. A shower of chip crumbs roll off his chest, and when he sees what’s in Five’s arms, his jaw drops, and he’s on his feet faster than Five’s seen him move in over a month.

“See?” Ben says, “Now you tell Five that we can’t just _let_ a dog--”

“What kind of dog is he?” Luther demands, letting the puppy nip at his large fingers, “What’s his name? Does he know tricks? Why are his ears bandaged? Is he hurt?”

Five grins. He’s certainly not going to face any significant resistance to the inclusion of his new pet into the family, now that he has Luther practically eating out of his hands. “His name’s Mr. Pennycrumb, he’s a purebred Cane Corso, from the finest guarding bloodline in the state--”

“--Oh my God,” Ben frets, “Someone’s going to come looking for it. Damn thing probably costs a fortune.”

“Ben, let me finish. He’s just gotten his ears docked, and I intend on putting him through the most intensive obedience regimen the world’s ever seen.”

“Jesus,” Ben groans.

Luther coos, as Mr. Pennycrumb realizes that Luther’s skin cannot simply be bitten through, and tugs harder on his thumb with his shiny little teeth, crinkling his wrinkly little face in puppy-anger. 

_Someday,_ Five thinks fondly, _those jaws will be strong enough to eviscerate anyone who breaks into our house._

Five doesn’t so much as notice Vanya as he gradually becomes aware of her presence, hovering around the corner of her door, pale as a ghost. She stares at the commotion groggily. She’s confused, but intrigued.

Then, she looks at him, and they meet eyes for the first time in a week.

Vanya pales, and she quickly whips around the corner, pale hair flashing like a specter’s, before the door closes behind her. 

He flinches, when he hears it click shut.

It’s not that Five’s reeling from their fight. 

It’s _not._ It’s definitely not that he feels a shiver of unease skittering like a swarm of invisible insects down his back whenever he’s near Vanya. It’s definitely not that he can’t stop replaying their fight in his head. 

Secretly, she’d understood, of course, that bygones are bygones. That she could not blame him for things he had done while they had been apart, any more than he cannot blame her, for the things she had done while they had been apart. She cannot begrudge him for Delores any more than he can begrudge her for that scattering of shabby significant others. 

But they did. And fighting with each other had been a way to fight with themselves, to scream their anger at not being able to wait, at not being able to hold completely to that bright, starry idea that someday, the world might fall into place again. Someday, he might not leave, and she might not have to sit around and wait for him to come back.

She hates that, he knows now. She really, really hates that. 

And then he’d gone and poured salt in the wound. 

“I’m not going to leave again,” he’d said, before he’d left. Again. 

He came back, though, didn't he? It hadn't been for good, only a few days.

But he hasn’t been able to talk to her since. He’s either pointedly avoiding her, or she’s shut up in her room, buried in her blankets. 

They haven’t spoken in nearly a month, but it feels longer, somehow, than the years he’d been apart from her. It’s the proximity, he thinks; they’re finally _this close,_ but they can’t get any closer. 

There’s also the little lack of insight he realizes he’d failed to disclose to Vanya, about Delores having been a department store mannequin, and not a flesh-and-blood woman. It hadn’t mattered to him at all, so he hadn’t seen the point in saying so, but he’s realizing that maybe it would’ve meant a lot more to her.

Well. Whoops.

He could cross the cabin right now, he knows. He could knock on her door, or blink in, and he could talk to her. But that raises the risk of listening to her speak to him, listening to her anger flare up again. That raises the risk of leaving them in a far worse place than they’d been when he’d left her. 

He’ll give it time, he decides. Time to let this new wound scab over, to let them both forget about what was said. Time heals most things, and this will be no exception. 

Besides, he has a lot on his plate. He has to hold the family together, has to keep them connected, has to keep his eyes open and watch for threats. He has to keep making his face public in faraway locations, to distract the Sparrows and keep them on a merry chase _(if they refuse to part with each other,_ his logic has gone, _surely they must assume the same of us as well)._ He now has a puppy to provide for, and is therefore too busy to talk to her. _Yes,_ he decides, _that works: It’s definitely not that I’m afraid of speaking to her; it’s that I’m busy. I’m a very important man, saddled with a very important task._

And that task is buying food for his dog. 

Or, rather, browsing the largest pet supply store on the other side of the Mackinac for its finest wet food, snatching a handcart full of it and several other items, and then bouncing away before the security guard that’s walking briskly towards him can get any closer. If they catch him, which they won’t, he’ll just bill it to his father. 

He lands in a parking lot a block away, plops his ass on the curb, and settles in to crack open a tin of gourmet dog food, the stuff that isn’t actually all that much better than the generic brand, but is packaged fancily, and therefore costs twice as much. Five, who is brand new to the concept of dog ownership, has yet to realize this distinction, so he is swollen with misplaced pride at how well Mr. Pennycrumb is being provided for, as he sets the puppy down on his lap, and lets him eat from the tin.

Five looks through his spoils, mentally sorting the varieties of dog food, committing to the governing principle that had guided his stealing spree: he intends to have Mr. P try one of everything, before determining which have the best results. 

He cracks open _The Sociopath’s Guide to Guard Dog Training,_ tugging a pen out from behind his ear and immediately begins annotating as he reads, crunching a Fudge Nutter as he does so. Part of his desire to dawdle is that he wants to give Mr. P time to eat. Part of it is that he wants to get a jump on training. It is most definitely not because he wants to delay his return to the cabin.

The universe decides to throw him a bone, because it is then that Five becomes aware, in the way that ex-hitmen and ex-survivalists and ex-child vigilantes become aware, of the rustle of wings above him, of the way the hairs on the back of his neck stands on end, the way they would when he’d be about to teleport, or when he’d feel a wave of Vanya’s powers bearing towards him.

Someone’s here. Someone like _them_ is here.

Five folds Mr. Pennycrumb close to his chest, and slides up to the side of an SUV, planting himself against it, angling his legs to conceal them behind its wheel.

He’s moved at the right time. 

From the thick band of clouds descend the Sparrows, four figures suspended in midair, and a flock of dark birds weighing on a power line. The birds give him pause; there seem to be more of them than before, but maybe it’s hard to judge how many birds are in a flock when said flock is flying at your face. 

Their backs are to him, and one of them has a bag of goodies, with a logo on the side that he recognizes to be that of the pet supply store. Which, okay, his fault there, he just _had_ to go to the biggest, shiniest one, and not the dinky little ones that wouldn’t have cameras. 

They haven’t noticed him yet.

If he were smart, which Five is, he’d take his dog and flash away.

But they’re saying something. They’re hissing it to each other, over and over, and the word’s so out-of-place that he has to swallow thickly, to keep from cracking up. But it must be important, if they of all people are saying it, so Five decides to decipher why on earth they’re so obsessed with _shoe, shoe, shoe._

But then he considers it, and glances down at his boots, examining the half-dry layer of forest mud coating his soles, and then dragging his gaze across the pavement in search of any prominent markings. _Are they tracking me,_ he wonders. _Are they looking for my tracks?_

Mr. Pennycrumb snuffles at the air. And he barks. Once. 

Five claps a hand over Mr. P’s wrinkly muzzle. He could jump away, but that would attract attention. It’d be too bright a flash, and _maybe,_ if he just stays still, they need not know he was here at all...

Then, a stripe of birds breaks off from the power line, wheeling in a tight circle around the Sparrows. There’s a lot about them he doesn’t know, he’s realizing; he’d been under the impression the bird woman had only been able to move as an entire flock, yet here she is, splitting herself in two.

They start to caw.

And there’s another hair-raising prickle on the back of his neck, making Five shift just a bit in discomfort.

The side of the SUV he’s hiding behind explodes, a beam of bright, blue fire slicing hotly through it, singing the side of his shoulder, right through his suit jacket. 

Five cries out, and nearly loses hold of Mr. P.

Footsteps. A flash of wing above him.

 _Time to go,_ he decides, and in the second before space bends around him, he catches a glimpse of a strangely familiar silhouette. 

He’d jumped so quickly he hadn’t thought much about where he was going. 

He lands on his ass, in the flattened grass next to Diego’s mediocre campfire, the one he’d let Five help him reconstruct, begrudgingly. 

Five blinks, glancing around. He’s a little surprised, even though he gets why he’s here; he’s been bouncing back and forth from the same two locations for so long, he seems to have defaulted to them, and it was simply a coin’s toss of a determination of where he’d land. It’s probably also subconscious; if it’s him that they’re tracking, then he can’t risk jumping back to the cabin, not before he has a plan of attack. He needs to buy time, to gather the other half of his family, before he heads to the family. 

_They’re a ways away from Vanya, Ben and Luther,_ he tells himself. _I was hours away from them, and they’ve been even closer the last time I saw them. So is it not a good thing, that they’re further away? Is it not a sign that my plan is working?_

He’s landed, and he isn’t alone. 

Diego’s there, tossing crumpled file pages onto the fire, sending sparks dancing up like fireflies. He’s become so desensitized to Five’s unannounced arrivals that he takes his time in turning to acknowledge him.

He stares at the dog, then suspiciously down into his beans, as though they are tainted with something that’s making him hallucinate. He seems to decide that they are not, that the dog is, in fact, sitting in Five’s arms, staring grouchily at him. “I… is this a mid-life crisis thing?”

“No. It is not,” says Five, who had stolen his dog for plenty of other reasons, as well as his mid-life crisis. If one could call fifty-eight the right age for a mid-life crisis, which Five does not.

“Right. Well, when you get that convertible, let me take it for a spin, yeah?”

“It’s not like that.”

“Sure it’s not. And hey, it’s less embarrassing than the alternative.”

“Which is?”

“Vanya.”

Five doesn’t know why his face burns up.

“Oh, don’t fret Five,” Diego drawls, plucking up a can of beans. “You’re like, an inch taller since we last saw you. You’re over that puberty hump, and soon enough, it’ll only be a horrible memory. Besides, you know how the song goes: the older the violin, the sweeter the music.”

Five throws a can at his head. It zips smoothly around it in a tight, quick orbit, before flying right back at Five’s face, knocking him on the temple.

Diego doesn’t even give him the dignity of looking around and crowing at him. Instead, he keeps walking, off onto the jungle of a lawn. 

Five lets him go, reaching for the first aid kit Allison had stolen, digging for something to patch up his shoulder. It’s cauterized, so he shouldn’t have to worry about infection, so long as he dresses it carefully.

Mr. Pennycrumb provides moral support, for which he receives a pat. 

It’s quiet for a minute, and Five enjoys the sound of the night insects buzzing.

Which is promptly shattered by Allison. 

“And _what_ are we going to do with a dog?” Allison demands, striding regally into the camp. Her face is twisted in pompous annoyance, but the second Mr. Pennycrumb’s doughy little face blinks up at her, a gooey cooing noise squeaks out of her mouth. She immediately falls on her knees, and begins lavishing Mr. P with belly rubs, which Five tolerates, as it will make her accepting of the new family pet’s presence. This is also vital, according to the _Guide,_ in ensuring that he will bond to her and be inclined to protect her when he is old enough to do so.

All in all, it takes Allison a full eight minutes to remember that Five is even here.

“What’s with that?” Allison nods at the patch on his shoulder.

“I ran into them,” Five says. _Them,_ of course, meaning _the Sparrow Academy._

“Yeah?”

“Didn’t go great.”

“I can imagine.” Allison goes rigid. “Wait, they’re around _here?”_ She snatches the Swiss Army knife from where it’s lying by the fire, and stares into the dark viciously. 

“Obviously not,” Five snaps. 

“Well where were they?”

“About half a state away from the others. I think I’m leading them away from them.”

“How do you figure that?”

“Well, I’m running around the area, showing my face, attracting sightings, to get them to follow my scent, instead of everyone else’s. And if they’re circling back from where they were the last time we saw each other, it must be working, right? I mean, they’re clearly lost, seeing as they’ve been dragging their feet in the middle of the state for _weeks_ now.”

Allison frowns. “You’re giving yourself a lot of credit.”

“Of course I am. The Sparrows never showed up here, right? So they were never following you. They were following _me.”_

Allison seems unconvinced. She draws her knees up to her chest. 

“I’m serious, Allison. They were. They were following _my_ tracks.”

“How do you know that?”

“Shoe.”

_“Huh?”_

“‘Shoe.’ They kept saying ‘shoe,’ over and over.” Five tugs his muddy boot up and points it at her. “See? My boots are caked with this shit, so I must be leaving prints.”

Allison tilts her head thoughtfully, mouthing the word. 

“Where are they from?” she asks after a moment, a particular tone to her voice that Five knows from experience always precedes a volley of far more pointed questions. 

Five squints. “Somewhere in Europe. Scandinavia, I think. At least, that’s what I heard back at the house.”

 _He’s on the right track,_ Allison realizes, rising to her feet, _but looking at it from the wrong angle._

“What is it?” 

“Get Diego and Klaus,” she commands. “Right now.”

“Why?” Five stands. “What’s going on?”

Allison, like her siblings, can read, write and speak fluently in seven languages. Allison, unlike the rest of her siblings, has a cursory knowledge in thirteen others. Her father had instilled this in her early on, in the event that her rumor needed to be applied to someone who does not speak any of the languages she can carry a proper conversation in. She cannot speak the languages, but she possesses an extensive enough vocabulary to cover most of her needs in each of them.

One of those languages happens to be Norwegian, so she puts two and two together.

“Five, you misheard them. They weren’t talking about you. They weren’t _looking_ for you. They weren’t saying _shoe,_ but _sju._ It’s a number in Norwegian, it’s number--”

“Seven,” he realizes, watching the firelight cast strange shadows across Allison’s face. There's only the crackling of the fire, as all the implications settle in.

Then they’re running for their brothers.

* * *

Lila has made a terrible mistake, one that slammed the door to the Sparrow Academy’s favor right in her face.

She had been talking to them animatedly, around a mouthful of cheap roadside fast food joint burger, about her power. They were always so excited, to learn about it, to see how it works, how wonderfully she can replicate their powers, how quickly she’d taken to imitating the inner works of them. And she’d been so caught up in the magic of it all, of having the first friends she’s ever made in her life, of having people who listen to her, who want to be with her.

She’s so stupid. She’s so, _so_ stupid. 

Because then, she’d said too much. Lila had not been thinking properly; what was it that Mother always said, about guarding your aces carefully, keeping them concealed up your sleeve? 

“It’s what I did with you, after all,” Mother had said when she was eight, squeezing her cheeks until they turned red and stayed that way. 

Lila had forgotten. She’d been drunk, not on alcohol, but on the _attention,_ on having six pairs of eyes turned to her, on having six powers thrumming in her blood, on the delicious warmth of belonging clinging to her shoulders like the old, familiar blanket she wrapped herself up tight in her narrow bunk back at her dorm at the Commission did, before it had burned to ash.

And then she had gone and ruined it.

She’d opened her big mouth and said, “Of course, how useful is it, really, since it only works when I’m close to one of us? How _annoying,_ that I can borrow your powers, but never keep them.”

She knew she was taking a risk when she’d said it. Of course she knew; there was a reason, after all, why her gut was turning as she said it, why her voice had gone high and quiet and airlike. Lila had been hoping that in throwing out her insecurities, she would receive some form of reassurance. She had been hoping for Six to slop a gelatinous purple hand on her shoulder and massage it gently. For Four to burst out laughing at the thought that Lila would ever be useless. For Three to compliment her on how high she’d flown. For Carla to smile and say, “Well, I hardly know you, but even so I must assure you that you are wrong.” For One to shake his head. For Two to coo that she could never be anything but useful; _useful,_ it must be noted, is the highest compliment she can imagine, being a Commission girl at heart.

She doesn’t get it.

Six does not place a hand on her shoulder. Four does not laugh dismissively at her worry. Two does not tell her she is a wonderful asset. One does not brush her concerns away. Three does not compliment her on her excellence. Carla does not fall over herself in an attempt to reassure her.

Lila knows instantly, as soon as the words spilled from her mouth, that it had been a mistake, a horrible, world-ending mistake.

She watches a ripple pass over her companions, a tightening of each and every one of their faces. Lila senses that great, golden window to a whole new world of comfort had just slammed shut on her, right as she’s started crawling through, slamming down on her thin fingers and shattering the bones to splinters. They’re going to leave her out there, in the cold, with her broken hands and her broken feelings, and they’re going to draw the curtains shut on her because…

Because they’re _angry_ with her, she realizes, feeling that prickling heat dig its claws into the underside of her skin. They don’t have to say it, or show it. She can feel it; they are angry, yes, they are angry that she hadn’t told them. 

An icy layer of shock has descended upon her, one so thick and cold that it numbs out all her other feelings, keeping them trapped below the surface, scratching at the underside of the barrier, desperate for air. She hasn’t felt like this since Mother was alive, since she’d made some small mistake during a business meeting that had made Mother clamp her chin with her bright red talons and glare at her. She hadn’t thought she’d ever feel quite like this again.

It takes her a while to claw her way through it. It takes all night, to turn it over in her mind, to understand exactly what she had done, but she isn’t able to sleep a wink, so she has the time to do it. 

She fucked up. She fucked up terribly. 

She stares at the ceiling, and stews in it.

 _You don’t want me,_ she realizes. _You’ve never wanted me. You only ever wanted my power._ _You only ever wanted me because you thought I could keep what I absorb._

And in revealing that she cannot, she has taken her value and scrubbed it away; Lila can do so much with her power, but the thing is, they can do it _too._ They can do what she does, better than she can, and she is bringing nothing new to the table. 

Teams are best composed of people of a variety of skills, she remembers from Mother’s seminars, and the thing is, the Academy doesn’t _need_ two levitators, or two bird-shifters, or two dreamers. She cannot offer them anything they don’t already have. She’s redundant, and she knows well from her years at the Commission what happens to people who are redundant.

They become expendable. They become _replaceable._

_They’re going to do it,_ she realizes the next morning. _They’re going to get rid of me._

Lila overhears them murmuring to each other, in the blue space of early morning, in the minutes before the sun warms the sky. 

They think she’s asleep, but she isn’t at all; she’s trained her breaths to rise and fall, as if she were, and keeps her eyes closed and her body limp, but she is very, _very_ awake, as she listens to the six of them rustle and whisper.

They aren’t speaking in English, but after spending a month trailing after them, for every waking and sleeping minute, it does not matter at all; Lila has the words tattooed on the inside of her eyelids, knows the meaning of them better than she knew the meaning of her own name. 

“And you’re certain this is our only option?” asks One.

“It has to be,” Two replies. “We are not complete without our Seven, without her power, and this one you’ve dragged in is worthless to us now. How can we keep her around, when she cannot keep the power after she copies it? What would be the _point_ of her?”

Lila bristles. She wants to leap up, and drag Two across the room by her shiny gold ponytail, until she's torn the whole thing off, scalp and all.

“But there is no guarantee that she’ll even come _with_ us,” One says.

“Of course there is,” protests Four. “Carla has her on a string now, do you doubt her?”

“Suppose they come for her,” whispers Three, “They will, won’t they?”

“And then we shall kill them,” replies Two coldly. “We’ve been wandering around this strange country for so long with no progress. Enough of it. Let's get her, and return to our own home, where we shall have the advantage, where we can finally be done with it all.”

They haven’t spoken her name, but they don’t need to. Lila can feel it, carving into the underside of her skin like a brand.

They want Vanya.

"And the other one?" Four mutters.

"Let her stay a while longer. Let her be of use for this fight to come, and then let us forget her entirely."

They have been looking for Vanya, all this time, and when they have her, when she is brought to them, there will be no place for Lila among them any longer. This family she has found isn’t her own. It had _never_ been her own. It had never wanted her as anything more than a vessel for someone else’s power. 

_Of course they do,_ she thinks, her eyes burning. _They’re not the Umbrella Academy, but that never mattered, did it? Because they’re all_ Hargreeves, _and that is what this family does. They chew me up and spit me out when I’ve lost my flavor, and then they stamp on me just for fun._

She’s been left out in the cold, but she isn’t cold, not at all. 

Hot tears are burning in her eyes, and a hotter fire burns in her chest. 

She’s been a fool, for ever thinking that she might belong among them, but she’s learned. There is no future for her with this family, not with _any_ of its branches; there isn’t a single good apple on this tree, so she must stop eating from it. She cannot just leave and wash her hands of them, because they will find her, and the life she’ll try to live, and they’ll root it out, just as they had before. They’ll drain the life from her, like a clan of vampire bats, and they’ll leave her empty and hollow in their wake. 

_And they're going to replace me with_ Vanya Hargreeves? _No fucking way. I'm better than she'll ever be. I'd never waste a power that wonderful._

Lila's throat burns with the pain of throttled tears. She wants to fly at them and gouge their faces off with a storm of sharp claws and beaks, to lift them off the bed on which they're crowded and crush them into a pulp, to carve a bright, sharp path through their middles, to dig into her belly with a butcher knife and watch their guts spill out. But that isn't _enough._

No, she needs to stay a while longer, Lila decides. She needs to _wait,_ for the right power to avail itself to her. She needs to have enough to rid herself of _everyone_ in one fell swoop, and that opportunity is hurtling towards her with its high beams on.

Lila makes a grand show of lifting herself from where she's slept on the floor, raising her arms to pop the bones in her spine. She turns, and fixes them with a too-big smile, batting her eyes and nodding attentively when they begin tossing orders around, as if she's stupid, as if she hadn't heard them at all.

She wants to be free, and she knows exactly what she has to do, in order to attain it.

* * *

Outside Vanya’s window, a storm rages, in an orchestra of crunching cellos and yowling strings. The wind shakes the thin wooden walls of the vacation cabin, as if they were made of paper, and there’s a steady trickle of water pouring in from the corner of her room, where the roof has come away from the walls.

Vanya isn’t afraid, when a noise like an explosion cracks in her ears, making them shiver in displeasure. It’s lightning, cracking a tree in two somewhere outside. It’s only a dream, and she cannot be harmed.

This late into the night, she feels a sort of exhilaration, a sort of invulnerability, and for the first time in a month, she feels brave enough to climb out of bed without hesitation. Her bare feet slap on the wood, and she tugs her red sweatshirt over her pajamas, and the door creaks open, but she does not flinch at the sound; it is storming so loudly, and it is only a dream, so no one can hear her anyway.

Besides, if Ben and Luther were awake, which they are not, she wouldn’t have attracted their attention anyway. Vanya looks at their limp forms, curled up on the couch in front of the television, which is broadcasting only wide bands of buzzing static, and she is struck with the thought that she must be the only person awake in all the world. 

It’s a strange thought, a thought that doesn’t make sense at all, but it keeps growing in her head, flowers blooming within flowers that crowd out all her worries and replace them with the wonderful, dreamy knowledge that someone is _waiting_ for her. 

She is trapped in one of those fairy tales she had obsessed over as a child; she needs not be alone any longer, because once she proves her bravery by leaving her castle after her long slumber, slipping past the dragons where they’re sleeping outside her door, she will be rewarded with a better and truer love than she’s ever known. She will be safe. She will never be alone again.

Vanya leaves silently, stepping outside for the first time in weeks, and she has a hard time feeling the cold seep into her bones. In fact, she isn’t sure she’s walking, so much as she is being led, by some force ahead of her, that has a hook in her lip and is reeling her in gently.

It’s so silly, this thought. She shakes her wet head, and it flies out her ear. She is not being reeled; she knows _exactly_ where to go, she’s discussed this very plan with her new friend, her wonderful magical accomplice, who will shed her skin and reveal her true form tonight. Vanya has been dreaming of her for weeks now, and she is at last worthy of finding out what it is all about. And once she does, she will be safe.

There is mud caked around her feet, and Vanya is slipping and stumbling as she navigates the thin deer path, making as much progress on her hands and knees as she does on her feet, but she goes willingly. It is so dark she can only see a foot in front of her, and she is certain that all the creatures in the forest have their eyes on her, but she will not stop. The storm is already passing over her head, and has given way to light rain, so surely, that is a sign that she has chosen correctly. 

At last, she comes upon it: a narrow stump, shaped like a footstool, among a stretch of twisted trees they’d driven past when they’d first arrived so long ago. Just beyond it is that stripe of overgrown country road the car had bumped down.

A shaft of moonlight breaks free of the heavy charcoal clouds, and there’s a flash of bright color ahead of her, one that makes Vanya’s heart sing. 

This time, Vanya is not the one trapped in a tower, waiting for the people she cares about to remember that she exists.

It is _Carla_ who is sitting and awaiting _her._ And because Carla does everything so well, she is not exhausted by waiting. Her legs are crossed neatly, toes tapping at the wet earth. 

It is Carla, who rises to her feet and smiles, her dark skin shining blue in the moonlight, who opens her arms to Vanya, calling out, “I knew you would come!”

She goes to her excitedly, slipping right into her embrace, which isn’t as warm as she’d thought it would be, but that’s alright, because it’s raining and... 

And there’s something bumping up against Vanya’s toe. She peers over Carla’s shoulder, and…

And it’s been months since Vanya’s seen it last, but she would recognize her violin case anywhere.

Seeing it, she feels a scraping sensation begin to take hold in the back of her head, the draw of a bow across the strings in her mind. Vanya waits for the waves of dreamlike warmth to rush over her, and carry it away.

But they don’t come.

They don’t come, because this isn’t a dream, _is_ it?

 _No,_ Vanya realizes. _No, this is not a dream at all._ She can recall how she had gotten to this very place. She had actually gotten up, and walked out of the cabin, and into the woods, and the mud squelching between her toes is real, and so is the rain plastering her hair to her head, and so is the... 

And so is the woman standing right in front of her. And so are the quick, dangerous shapes moving through the woods around her.

Vanya isn’t dreaming anymore. That blooming, creeping warmth isn’t in her head anymore, isn’t crawling into every crevice of her brain like English Ivy spreads across a habitat it’s infested. She is looking at Carla with clear eyes, and she is seeing her for exactly what she is, and what she wants. 

_I’m not safe,_ she thinks. _I’m not safe here._

“Come away with me,” Carla whispers into the shell of her ear. “Come away from this awful place, and these awful people who hurt you and abandon you. They cannot possibly love you, you know. Not like we can. And won’t it be so nice, to be loved properly?”

“Yes,” Vanya replies woodenly, realizing that she has gone wandering off into the dark, and stepped into a steel trap. “Yes, it would be nice.”

But it won’t be good.

That feeling is back, tenderness intermingled with terror, and the terror is rising. She has been here before, in this exact place, in the woods amidst a brewing storm, with a cabin beyond her. She has had these sweet words whispered in her ear, by a person pretending to be someone he was not, and she knows now, that Carla’s words are real, but her intentions aren’t.

Vanya has been in this place before, with this sort of person before, and she knows exactly where the path she’s being tugged down is going to lead, and what will happen if she screams at the bite of the steel jaws of the trap biting down on her. She knows how much damage it will cause, for her, for her family, if she were to scream or struggle, and she knows it isn’t worth the possibility of losing her brothers. 

_Maybe,_ she thinks, _it can be different this time._

She wants to be safe, and she knows what she’ll have to do, in order to attain it.

“Take me home,” Vanya says, and Carla smiles wolfishly.

* * *

Ben’s scar aches when it rains. 

It usually stays as a dull, pulsating throb in the front of his face, but tonight, it’s bad enough to jerk him out of his sleep, making him kick his blanket down to snake around his legs, pressing his hands to his face. Bad enough to wake up the creatures in his gut and send them roiling against his skin.

Ben tumbles out of bed, stumbling towards the window. He cranks it open, and empties the contents of his stomach out onto a perfectly innocent bush just below him. He can’t even appreciate how nice plants smell in the rain.

Once he’s done, he grimaces, and stumbles off towards the kitchen, for a glass of water to wash the metallic aftertaste out of his mouth.

Luther’s already there, in the kitchen, waiting with a glass.

“You alright?” he asks. Ben can’t make out a single one of his features, only the way the dim, gray light makes him seem twice as large as normal. But the sight of him doesn’t make Ben’s breath catch anymore; somewhere along the way, Luther’s frame had stopped being intimidating, and had started looking reassuring.

“No,” Ben grimaces, accepting the glass after a moment’s hesitation.

When Luther reaches out to him, and plants an enormous hand in the middle of his back, guiding him out to the couch, Ben follows willingly, grateful for the gentle pressure that steers him towards the seat. But he can’t stop the tension from knotting up his shoulders. 

By now, Luther’s worn a sizable dent into the thing, so Ben slides right into the middle of the cushion, pulled by Luther’s considerable gravity into his side. 

“This happening a lot?”

“What? Getting up for a drink?”

“You know what I mean, Ben.” Luther’s watched Ben enact this very ritual for years upon years. It’d started when they were hardly more than toddlers, and had ebbed away by the time the Academy had made its debut, but he remembers spending long nights rubbing his hand in rhythmic circles over Ben’s back while he vomited. Nobody forgets something quite like that. 

Ben doesn’t answer, which is an answer in and of itself.

So. The old nausea is back. 

Luther supposes it makes sense; Ben’s in a body that wasn’t his own until he’d swept in from outside of time and stolen it. Add onto that his former status of ghost, and yeah, Luther gets why Ben would be feeling his body a lot more intensely than everyone else. Luther knows a thing or two about that visceral sense of wrongness that comes with realizing you’re in a body that isn’t quite _yours;_ he’s been there before, and he’s there now, and he’ll probably be there until he dies _(which,_ he reflects grimly, _will probably be earlier than I ought to, given how engorged my heart is)._

And he figures that maybe, he can help Ben through it, so he lifts an arm invitingly.

Ben looks at him, uncertainly, so Luther offers: “It’s fine. You’re not weak, I promise.”

Ben settles beneath it, after a moment’s hesitation. “It’s not that,” he says.

“Then what is it?”

Ben considers. He feels strangely _guilty,_ about accepting Luther’s concern. “I think it’s… How do I put this?”

Luther waits.

“That I’ve spent so long taking care of someone, that I don’t really remember how to let someone do that for me.”

“Klaus?”

“Klaus.”

Luther nods quietly. “Does that… bother you?”

“What, you mean did I hate it? Sometimes, yeah. It can be a lot sometimes, and I didn’t really have any other option. But if you sent me back, and had me face that situation again, I’d still have done it. I like taking care of him, you know? I just...” He frowns, unable to think of how to put it.

“You want to know that he can take care of himself? You want someone to look after you, sometimes?”

Luther radiates warmth, like a space heater. Ben leans in tighter.

“Yeah.” Ben sighs. “We’re together now, did you know?”

“Oh. I guess that explains some things.” Luther thinks back, to Hotel Oblivion, to… well, _everything._ “Everything alright there?” 

“Why?” Ben asks testily.

“You’re here, with me and Vanya, and not there, with him. Something’s up.”

“Speaking from personal experience there?”

The golden charm around Luther’s wrist glints in the dull gray light. “Yes.”

“Then yeah,” Ben replies, sweeping his hair out of his face. “You ever feel like… like you’re with someone so much that they become a part of you? And you don’t know what to do with yourself without them? Not in a good way, or… well, I guess it’s good in _some_ ways, but they just… it’s like you’re stuck in quicksand together, and if you let go, you sink faster, but if you hold onto each other, you’re still getting sucked in.”

“And you’re sinking now?”

“I’m up to my fucking neck.” 

“But you’re not letting go.”

“I don’t want to do that. We just got _started_ together, but I’m worried that… that this is as far as we’ll go, before we just end up right back in that sinkhole. It feels like we’re missing something, like we’ve _always_ been missing something, that’s meant to get us the rest of the way. But we just haven’t found it yet, and I’m not sure if we ever will. Does that make sense?”

“Yeah.” Luther stares at the mountain of empty chip bags on the floor nearby. “I guess we’re all adrift right now.”

“Not you and Allison.”

Luther bites his lip. “She needs space.”

“Yeah, but when that’s over. When she comes back to you, you’re set.”

“Are we?”

“Of course you are.”

“Ben, look at me. I’m a mess. Everything’s over and I just… I don’t know what to do. I don’t think I was meant for anything but the Academy.”

Ben considers it. Each and every one of their siblings had gotten to grow up and go on to do something, even if that something had been a vague imitation of what they’d done for their entire childhoods. Having died, Ben had never gotten that opportunity; now, the doors are thrown open, and he is finally able to step through, but he’s just as clueless as Luther, who’d never so much as peeked through them, to see what might be on the other side. 

If anything, he might be the best person to talk Luther through this. 

“You could go back into the astronaut business,” he offers. 

Luther sighs. “I’m never going into space again.”

“What?” Ben frowns. “But you _love_ space.”

Luther’s head bows contemplatively. “Do you remember,” he asks, “When Dad sent me and Pogo up into space?”

“Of course I do. The news wouldn’t shut up about it for months. You’re the youngest person who’s ever been in space. You’re _Spaceboy.”_

Luther laughs. He’d always been so starstruck, when Dad had taken such an intense interest in his fixation, when he’d nurtured it so carefully, when he’d thrown his support behind his golden son and let him literally reach for the stars. Now, he knows that it’d all been to get Luther under his thumb.

But still… “You know what it’s like up there? Sitting in a tin can that’s getting shot around the world so fast you can circle it in an hour and a half?”

“I can’t imagine,” Ben answers honestly.

“It’s… well, there’s nothing like it. It’s cold, and so quiet you can hear your blood pumping through your ears, and even Pogo’s too. And the whole time, you know that you only have so much air, and all it takes is one little spark, and that’s it. You burn up, and there’s nothing of you left. You turn into stardust.”

“That’s terrifying.”

“It’s worth it. Because you’re up there, above everyone, and you can see the _world_ below you, and you realize how _big_ it is.”

“Still terrifying.”

Luther laughs. “It was the scariest thing that had ever happened to me. And then you died, and that was the scariest thing that had ever happened to me. And then I… turned into this--” he holds up a leathery hand, stares at the puckered skin-- “and then there was that night, with Jenkins, and the cabin, and Allison and all that _blood...”_ He sighs. “It just keeps _happening.”_

“But at least being in space is a fun kind of scary. You could find aliens, have you ever thought of that? I’ll bet you they’ve made contact with us already.”

Luther imagines it: he could go to Mars, on that trip he and Dad had discussed, but had never come to pass because of his accident. He could reach out and catch meteors before they fell to earth, or cling to comets and measure their trails of brilliance for ice percentages. He could go chasing distant stars.

“I don’t need to, is the thing. I’ve already been.”

And besides. He doesn’t need to go to space to find a star to orbit. All he ever had to do was fly west, and now, he doesn’t even need to do that; all that’s left is to wait, for however long it takes, and the star will find him. “Everything I care about is down here.”

Ben glances down, at the locket in Luther’s palm, and he gets it.

They were best friends once, as toddlers, and though they'd drifted ever since, that sandbox camaraderie is still here, buried under all those peeling layers of estrangement. Ben's always been fond of Luther, and Luther had spent so many years reaching up to polish the bronze hand of his brother's statue with his palm, to tell him silently about his worries, that it's so easy, to fall back into this old habit. 

"I've missed you," Luther says quietly, and Ben nudges his shoulder affectionately. There's nothing left to say after that, and that's okay. They just sit together, both reluctant to be alone, and deeply comfortable in the other's company.

They aren’t sure, exactly, who nods off first, only that they both do, dozing against the poor, creaky couch to the drumbeat of the rain, to the whip’s crack of lightning somewhere beyond the hills, exploding a tree outside a cabin, exploding inside the cabin itself…

Wait.

Luther jerks awake, and Ben flops to the warm, indented space he leaves behind when he leaps to his feet, whirling around.

But there isn’t a jagged, smoking hole in the cabin’s roof. There isn’t a spark of fire starting in the middle of the floor.

There’s Five, with a puppy in his arms and Diego and Klaus and Allison clinging to him. They’re staring at him, wild-eyed, all panting with exertion and stinking of ozone.

“What is it?” Luther asks, and behind him, Ben stirs, smearing his shaggy hair out of his face as he crawls to his feet. No one answers him; they’re too busy dashing to the windows, staring suspiciously out into the dark through the screen door, hissing to each other about the shadows in the shadows that look just a little bit off. Assuming correctly that the commotion has to do with the Sparrows, Luther falls in line, and prepares himself for a fight. 

Ben decides to wake Vanya, so he skirts around the chaos, crossing the tiny hallway to her bedroom, and shouldering the door open. He frowns.

"Hey guys? Vanya’s gone.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I guess I really do just hate middle chapters, huh?
> 
> Sparrow Notes: (Just to get what I decided upon for their powers out there) So, in general I wanted to preserve most of what the comics canon had to offer. Which was admittedly not much at all, as at the time of this fic's writing, we have a few shreds of info from the... several pages they've appeared in. Their powersets and their number designations (I tried to uphold the Umbrellas' in-order-of-increasing-power-level logic for number designation) will age badly, and I'm okay with that.  
> -One: Density manipulation. A divergence from the comics, probably, but I didn't want any repeats, and two blond male Ones with super-strength is... no. Anyway, density manipulation essentially means, in layman's terms, that he can be both super strong and light enough to float if he so chooses; so that covers both his super-strength and possible levitation, as exhibited in the comic (since this is a universe where the levitator belt technology of the comic doesn't exist). He's also the only member of the Sparrows whose number matches up here; everyone else was just a guess.  
> -Two: Levitation and telekinesis. I'm not sure if that's what's happening in the comics, or if she's the one doing it. I don't really care. She was the only character whose powers I was ??? about, so she got the only power I had on my ??? list.  
> -Three: Transforming into a sentient flock of corvids. Straight from the comics.  
> -Four: Percussive, searing-hot blasts of energy from her eyes. From the comics, with the exception of the color and the source of the blast (in the comics, it seems to be her mouth). In the comics, the beam is black, but the show's motif of blue-white being related with power needed to be maintained, so I made an exception. And, full disclosure, I tried to write the mouthblast, but couldn't quite make it stick. So, I changed the source just a bit.  
> -Carla: Dream manipulation. In the comics, hers is in the vein of Allison's. This changed to enable the plot I needed, which was Carla-manipulates-Vanya, by creating an opportunity for her to do so without being there for the family to attack (since I couldn't envision a scenario where she'd be able to get close to her for extended periods of time without that resulting in a conflict).  
> -Six: Inflicting wounds on his own body that reflect on others' and not him, kind of like a voodoo doll. From the comics.


	4. all i thought i had found

In the form she is in, there is very little that Grace can do.

In the Hargreeves house, she is molded in the shape of a woman. In the mountains, she does not have the luxury of such a body; Sir Reginald had seen it fit to determine the effects of one’s raising by a mother who is not remotely human in appearance, thus, he had sculpted her second body in the shape of a cube.

 _Sir Reginald was right to do that,_ she tells herself automatically, anytime she thinks about it. He was right, as a body such as the one she inhabits in the mansion is not conducive to life in a bunker; it occupies unnecessary space, and draws unnecessary power from the generator, and besides, he feels it necessary to teach this batch of children self-sufficiency from as young an age as possible, and therefore it would be counterintuitive to have a wire mother to cling to. Something as simple and utilitarian as possible had to be done, it _had_ to.

But oh, the _limitations:_ As a cube, Grace cannot touch, cannot cook, cannot clean, cannot embrace her children when they are wounded or worried or willful. She simply floats on a predetermined magnetic track through the bunker, and observes her children, speaking when spoken to as Reginald had preferred her to. Here, her role is now that of observer, now that her children have grown and there is no reason for her to care for them any longer. Though, for some reason, she still does.

For months, she had been wandering that trap, making laps around the bunker’s strip of rooms and waiting, patiently, for the arrival of her children. She knew where they were, of course; being of one mind and two bodies, she was simultaneously floating in the bunker's sole shower stall, and dusting the rhinoceros head in the Hargreeves mansion, listening to Sir Reginald receive daily reports from her dear sweet One, and so she had remained quite on top of things.

For instance, when the family returns at last, not six strong, but _eight,_ Grace is not surprised in the least bit; she recognizes one shape instantly as her Vanya, now back at last from her long trip and clearly better for having taken it, as she has come back calm and placid and far better than the snarling, weeping creature she'd been when she'd left, but now she has a string of new friends. 

The other, she has never seen before. She stalks into the bunker with a similar sense of awe and curiosity as her fellow newcomer, but with a feline tilt to her gait, one that is far more confident and far more purposeful.

Upon a quiet scan of the woman’s vitals, which reveals the biological signatures that distinguished her children from all others, she comes to understand that _yes,_ this is one of her daughters. Just a new one, one that she has never seen before, how _silly_ of her, not to have seen her. So, Grace tidily adds another child to her programming, and that is that. She is now mother of fourteen, and she loves them all as best as she can. 

One, who has always clung to her especially tightly, introduces Grace to her new child, who stares up at her with an expression so complex on her face that Grace’s own facial recognition software is whipped into a frenzy, determining the meaning behind the imperceptible twists in her facial muscles. First, absolute confusion, which turns to a hint of amusement, and then to a sadness so deep and hungry that Grace mistakenly sends a command to her stateside body, which begins making cookies. 

Her new daughter introduces herself, tight-lipped, as Lila, and Grace adds this to her memory bank as well. Her new daughter is named Lila, and she is physically several years younger than the rest of them, which she dismisses as a flaw in her own sensors; if this woman is her daughter, she must be their age, therefore Grace is wrong somehow. Her new daughter is named Lila, and she shares a birthday with her thirteen siblings, and she will reveal all the pieces of herself to Grace soon enough. 

Having a new child to account for, she pays particularly close attention to her in the hours that follow. She makes it a point to train her cameras and auditory sensors on the woman whenever she passes by.

Grace notes that Lila is being ignored by the rest of her children, who have fallen in to showing Vanya her proper place among them. There are seven cots; there have _always_ been seven cots in the sleeping room, and now at long last, the seventh is full. Perhaps one of the children can provide Lila with a sleeping bag for the floor, then.

How wonderful, Grace decides, that everyone is home. From what she has overheard of her son’s conversations with Sir Reginald (which she knows she is being quite nosy to listen in on, as she is most certainly overstepping and will be causing very much trouble, but she does believe it necessary to have all the proper information at the earliest possible time, so she might be better able to complete her tasks), the children have made up. No longer will they be wasting their time fighting with each other; they would be coming home to their mother with their dear sister, and they would help her learn to be a team player.

One hasn’t quite mentioned that he and the rest of his siblings have made up yet, but Grace is sure that will come with time. After all, in inviting Vanya over to play, they’ve certainly taken the first step. She is sure the rest of the family will be along soon enough. 

Vanya is quite cowed by their affections, but Grace does not think it too unusual; she has always been a rather shy girl, and she is most certainly disconcerted, perhaps jetlagged. After all, Norway is so many hours away from the United States, and the rocketplane ride had certainly not helped in adjusting her. 

Lila, Grace notes quickly, is experiencing an elevated heart rate. She compares it to her other new arrival, and finds that Vanya’s is slowing, into a steady calm drumbeat. Grace’s initial hypothesis had been that the mountain air had been responsible for Lila’s erratic heartbeat; she does not know where the young woman is from, but she knows that Vanya is from a comparatively flat stretch of land, and would therefore struggle to adapt to the change in elevation. She assumed Lila would as well.

It is not the case. So, Grace coolly swipes that from her list of probable causes, and returns her attention to Lila.

She is sitting in the kitchen, alone, clicking her white-painted nails against the stainless steel table in a steady rhythm, its pattern one that Grace draws a rather unnecessary and frivolous parallel to the auditory emissions of an agitated rattlesnake’s tail. Her feet (clad in combat boots, Grace notes, that are in need of a resoling soon; she will have to make an appointment with the proper person in the nearest town with such facilities, and adds it to her itinerary) scrape at the concrete floor, and her greasy hair is hiding her face in such a peculiar way that she must be slouching on purpose, to ensure that no one can look at her.

Grace’s libraries of human behavior are extensive, and she draws upon them often, as she does now when she consults her gesture catalog to determine how her newest child is feeling. 

She concludes: agitation. 

Oh, she must be having trouble adjusting. Children always struggle when moving to new locations, say the mothering directives, and therefore must be made to feel as welcome as possible, so Grace resolves to bake Lila a cake. A big, cheery _Welcome Home!_ Cake. She will have to determine her favorite colors, with which to adorn it with, and her favorite flavors. She knows already that Vanya prefers vanilla; perhaps Lila does as well. 

Speaking of Vanya, she has at last been left alone, as the Sparrows have gone off to chat amongst themselves. Grace cannot extend her auditory sensors particularly far in this form, so she only catches a snippet of their conversation, the word “Lila.”

Ah, good. They will be discussing the unfortunate and rather embarrassing lack of an eighth cot to sleep on. Grace adds that to her shopping list as well. 

The woman in question has left the kitchen. Grace cannot see where she is from the angle she is levitating at, and resolves to look for her in a moment. She hypothesizes that Lila has gone looking for the rest of her family; how good of her, to want to be included.

Vanya, alone, is perched unsteadily on the edge of the cot that had been designated as hers, taking shallow, quick breaths. She has her violin back, which Grace is pleased to see; it’s always good for children to have intellectually stimulating hobbies. She is showing signs of anxiety, and therefore must be taking steps to calm herself, which Grace is proud of her for. Vanya is opening the case, gently plucking the instrument up; _oh,_ Grace notes, _this is a new violin, a white one. How lovely._

Vanya rises to her feet, instrument in hand, and strides out of the room. Her face is turning blank as a death mask, and her heart rate spikes.

 _Oh dear,_ Grace worries, puttering off after her. Vanya had been prone to stage fright as a child; she’d hate for that nasty habit to rear its head here. If only someone would ask her to speak, she’d be able to tell Vanya that she is perfectly adequate at the instrument, and that her siblings would love to hear her play.

Vanya has found the rest of the family, thank _goodness_ she won’t have to play without an audience as she once did. Even Lila is here, how nice of her to come to hear her new sister display her talents. Lila’s big, luminous blue-white eyes are fixed on her family, and Grace is sure that…

Grace reexamines her memory bank. That is not the color of Lila’s eyes. She is experiencing an inconsistency, how unfortunate, she will have to trawl through her data and go fishing for bugs again.

Vanya draws her bow back across her strings, and begins, and...

And…

Grace’s audio sensors no longer work. She is no longer suspended in the air, but laying on the concrete, and she has no idea how she'd gotten here, she can't even see if she had perhaps knocked into something that had sent her flying. She can sense that her internal wiring has peeled apart, that the glass and metal guarding her most important components have shattered, and she has perhaps ten seconds until total critical failure of this vessel relegates her to a single mind in a single body half a world away. 

She can't see at all. In fact, her camera is broken in so many places that she is staring at everything from within a prism of shattered glass, a prism that turns blue, then white, then red.

Grace does not understand what she is seeing, at first. She assumed that she has every possible parenting protocol outlined, for a joining of the two halves of her family, but she finds she has fallen short. There is nothing for this situation she is deducing that she has found in, nothing at _all._ She digs deep, into the thin lines of her code, scrubbing and scrubbing and _scrubbing,_ to try and get it clean enough to fix this mess that’s unfolding in front of her, but she just _can’t…_

In the form she is in, there is very little that Grace can do, before her second body sputters out of commission permanently.

Except watch, as her children kill each other.

* * *

When Five Hargreeves jumps his siblings to the family mansion in search of their sister and those who had taken her, they find it quiet.

This in itself is not unusual, as it is typically quiet after midnight, and dark as well; Sir Reginald had been asleep for hours, as usual, and Grace is plugged in for the night. And as the family soon discovers, the Sparrow Academy are not occupying a single one of the rooms. Neither, to their disappointment, is Vanya.

The house is quiet, but as they soon discover when they descend to the first floor, it is by no means without activity.

Dr. Phinneus Pogo is something of a night owl, in both the world that wasn’t and the world that is. He likes staying up deep into the evening, and puttering about the house when all its inhabitants are asleep. He likes to listen to the clicking echo of his cane as it bounces off the fine mahogany-paneled walls, as he gathers his thoughts. He likes to sit in the library with some hot tea and the latest edition of his medical journal. 

He changes the sort of tea he drinks every evening, as he views it quite important to introduce some small variety into one’s life, to keep from growing too dull in the mind. On this evening, for example, it is rooibos. He sips it unsteadily, as he has sipped every cup of tea he’s had since November of last year; when finished with his readings and his wanderings, Pogo would place the pot of tea in the refrigerator, as he found waste distasteful. Vanya had always, always been the one to finish it the next morning.

Until, of course, she had gone away. After that, the pots would be poured down the drain by the Allison who no longer exists.

Tonight, Pogo is shuffling uneasily to the kitchen, moving to open the refrigerator, when he freezes.

And turns, to see the shapes of his wayward charges lurking in the doorway, their faces floating in the dim yellow light.

“Pogo,” says Luther, with an odd lilt to his voice, as if it’s caught on something.

“You’re not meant to be here,” he replies, glancing over his shoulder, as if Sir Reginald will materialize behind him.

“We know,” Luther replies. “But this is important.” 

Pogo folds his hands over his cane, and nods. He’ll allow an explanation. He’ll still have to tell their father, but for the sake of their shared history, he will listen to them.

“Vanya’s in trouble,” Five says. “The Sparrow Academy took her.”

 _Did you know?_ Five wonders. _Did you know they were going to take her?_

He didn’t, for what it’s worth. But that hardly matters.

“We need to help her,” Five continues. “But we don’t know where they’d be. You know, though, don’t you?”

He does.

Pogo knows all of Sir Reginald’s secrets, including that of the location of his second family. His face twists up in pain at the conflict he is now facing; the location is a secret for a reason, after all, and he is not permitted to share it...

“Pogo, _please.”_

In all his life, Pogo has never heard Number Five beg before. In fact, he takes a minute to realize that is exactly what he is doing. 

He looks at them, his gaze shifting slowly from one pleading face to the next, to the next, to the next. He looks at the children he helped raise.

He thinks of Sir Reginald, the greatest man in the world. The eccentric billionaire and adventurer, who’d made him into the person he was today, who’d given him his mind and his education and his _life._

He thinks of Vanya, the smallest of his charges, who cast the largest shadow. The Vanya he had raised is not the Vanya his children want him to save-- this Vanya had never had her powers and her feelings repressed by years of lies and medication. This Vanya had never left home. This Vanya had never killed him-- but he has no way of knowing that. 

In the years to come, when there is at last time to tell Pogo about who they are, and what they had been through, he will quietly reflect upon this very moment. He will find that had he known that this Vanya his children who were not his children were asking him to help them save was in fact not the Vanya whose tears he mopped up with a handkerchief, whose hand he held when she needed a shot at the infirmary, he would have done it anyway.

For what it’s worth, she is similar in all the ways that count: This Vanya had also known the sting of loneliness, but it was a loneliness fostered by the weight of being a scapegoat, of having the blame for an apocalypse that never came to be borne down on her small shoulders, and being made to carry it while proving that she would never do it. This Vanya still loved her violin, and loved playing private concerts for Pogo in the evenings, as she was always so worried that she would be laughed at if she played in front of anyone else. This Vanya still received more of Pogo’s hugs than any of her siblings. Had he known that this Vanya was not the one he had raised, he would have loved her anyway.

In all worlds pertinent to the telling of this story, Dr. Pogo is the most loyal of right hands. He carries each and every one of his master’s secrets, and takes pride in doing so. He believes, quite seriously, that he shall die with them all nestled closely around his heart, and thinks it good and right. 

Or at least, he _was_ the most loyal of right hands, until an event so earth-shaking in its scale will urge him to behave otherwise.

In the world that wasn’t, Dr. Pogo had decided to stop keeping his master’s secrets because of Vanya Hargreeves, and the danger he believed she posed to her family. He had stood his ground and gone willingly to his own death to defend the children he spent the best years of his life loving, and for the first time, he was able to protect two of them from a horrific and entirely preventable pain. 

In the world that is, Dr. Pogo decides to stop keeping his master’s secrets because of Vanya Hargreeves. However, in this world, he will not take the first step onto the path that will lead him out of his master’s control forever for the fear of her, but for the love of her.

He sighs, nodding his gray head gravely, turning the words over and over in his head, feeling their weight acutely.

And he tells them where to go.

* * *

Pogo had given them a set of coordinates, with which Five devises an equation that will leap the seven of them to the bunker in which the Sparrow Academy had lived for twenty-nine years. 

Once he has it, they leave immediately. 

It’s summer in the Northern Hemisphere, but even in the far north of Norway, the snows haven’t completely left, especially not the ones gathered at the crests of the Scandinavian Mountains. The Hargreeves siblings have landed on the summit of one such mountain, collapsing into a crater of snow. 

While the rest of his siblings stumble to their feet gracelessly, it takes Five a moment to follow. He remains on his knees, feeling the snow soak through his pants, struggling to snatch his ragged breaths as they try to fly away from him. The stress of carrying six passengers-- five human and one canine-- across the planet, is simply exhausting; he’d even misfired, landing them miles from their destination. Bright spots flash in his vision, and he decides they will have to walk the rest of the way.

No one complains. Luther simply tugs him up gently by his shoulder, and he allows it, swallowing his exhaustion and replacing it with a determined, steely ferocity. 

And then they set to walking.

They sink heavily into the snow, and soon decide that the best way to move is in a line, single file, so each may beat the trail deeper, kicking up sparkling plumes of diamond dust as they walk. 

Luther, the largest and densest of them, has the easiest time wading through thigh-deep snow, so they let him take the lead, and the informal position as the group’s snow plow. 

Five occupies the rear, having taken a moment to squirm with Mr. Pennycrumb, to build for him a makeshift sling out of his suit jacket. He still holds the weight of the puppy in his arms, distrusting of his invention’s ability to stand up against a curious puppy, sticking his wrinkled face out to bite at his thick puffs of breath. Five does not prevent his puppy from doing so; he takes it as a sign that Mr. Pennycrumb will grow up to be a particularly discerning guard dog. 

The cuffs of Allison’s sweater sleeves bulge out of the droopy brown coat she is wearing, and she tugs them down, to cover her hands, which are turning raw in the cold sting of the air. She is the only one of her siblings who’d thought to dash away in the minutes before their leap across continents, to grab something that might help her dress for the weather. 

Klaus had snapped at her for leaving them, and now, he is trembling like a leaf in his hideously tacky Hawaiian shirt. Allison makes it a point to glance over her shoulder and cast a callous smile in his direction. He flips her off, pouting. 

There’s a crack of thunder in the distance. Then another.

The walk is beautiful. Up here, the indigo sky is crystalline with falling snow, and the stars are shining like jewels stitched into the night sky, almost as clear as they’d been in space. There’s an aurora, just beyond the top of a nearby mountain, like strange slashes of green rain, blooming like a scarlet rose. The sight is lovely enough to make Allison think that it isn’t the altitude at all that is stealing the breath from their lungs, but the strange beauty of the place.

Talking seems almost sacrilegious. There’s too much at stake, too much they need to do, so standing around and engaging in small-talk feels absurd. The silence that settles over their shoulders and slips into their mouths lasts for a long while, and they are content with it, by allowing the musical howl of the wind around them to do the work of covering the crunch of their footfalls. At least, until they’ve drifted apart, and the dread that’s boiling in their blood urges them to reach out to each other, to talk lightly, to chase away the fear. 

Allison remains on Luther’s heels, and Five trails far behind everyone else, scanning the horizon as he walks. Despite themselves, they begin to lengthen their line, as wide swaths of distance open up between them. It’s perfectly fine, that they’re distancing themselves; they are of one like purpose now, and have been since they left their cabin hideout. 

Leading the pack, Allison and Luther have found the snow beginning to diminish to such a degree that Allison is finally able to leap out from behind Luther, to walk at his side without slipping into the snow any deeper than her shins. 

He turns, and looks to her through the lush, heavy snow, which catches in Allison’s billowing curls and crowns her in white. The moon is so close Luther feels he could reach up and touch it, cradling it between his palms like he might a face. It’s cast everything in shades of silver, making it feel as though he’s looking at Allison through the veil of a dream. She pierces through the snow, reaching to slip a chilly hand into his own, and he squeezes it tightly. 

Five can tell they’re speaking, by the breaths emerging in a series of puffy clouds. He’s glad he can’t make out any of the words. He doesn’t need to; the way they’re leaning into each other, and the flash of their smiles in the moonlight tell him everything he needs to know. 

Klaus, Ben and Diego are slightly less of a mystery. Their voices cling to the chilled air, steam from their breaths trailing behind them. They’re complaining about the air up here, about how tiring it is, how every step seems to drain them.

Five agrees with this notion; there’s a hungry ache in his chest, pressing urgently for more air that he simply cannot reach. He feels like he’s in his old body again, the one matching his age, and he’s trying to navigate a particularly infuriating stairwell. 

There’s something else, something prickling on the air between the three of them. It probably has a lot to do with the way Diego’s staring at the arm Ben’s slung around Klaus’s waist, but Five decides it isn’t his business to pry any further.

Against his chest, Mr. Pennycrumb is taking small, quick wheezes. He reaches in, and rubs the puppy’s tawny back in reassurance. He should invest in some dog sweaters in the future, he decides, when he considers how his skin is prickling from the cold, and feels the shortness of the puppy’s fur under his fingertips. 

The weight of Mr. Pennycrumb is really starting to make his arms ache, and he becomes keenly aware that he will not be able to lift his puppy for very much longer; he’ll grow so _fast,_ and _God_ does Five feel old all of a sudden. He decides not to complain, about the heaviness. He’ll miss it when it’s gone. 

The wind is changing, dragging flurries of snow up from where they’re resting. They swirl, in a pattern Five recognizes from ballroom dancing lessons as that of a waltz. It’s as if the eddies of snow are possessed by a swarm of spirits, acting out some dance that they’d never gotten to have. Five isn’t sure if it’s the sight or the sound that’s shaping it that’s sending a shiver down his spine. His heart’s pounding savagely against his ribcage, and he doesn’t know why. 

Mr. Pennycrumb sticks his head out of his carrier, snuffling at the air. Then, he squirms in Five’s grip, rolling over and barking sharply into the air. His bandaged ears twitch. 

“What is it, boy? Is Timmy down the old well?” Klaus says, too softly to be heard by anyone but Ben and Diego, who scoff amusedly. 

Then, a sharp cry, echoing out from ahead. It’s Allison, pointing down the ridge, at a squat square of gray covered in a fine layer that Five would have otherwise mistaken as a boulder, were it not for the square of sputtering golden light spilling out onto the flat yellowish grass, emanating from within the stone.

It’s not a boulder. It’s a bunker.

They’ve found it.

Luther picks up his pace, and leads the charge down the slope, his enormous strides building a momentum that sends him practically flying down the steep incline. He hits the ground so hard there’s a tweak in his ankle, but he keeps running. Everyone else skids or slides down after him, crying Vanya’s name into the night. The crags around them catch the name and echo it, again and again and again, _Vanya, Vanya, Vanya_ ringing like the enormous bell of an ancient church out into the wild.

Half the bunker has been blown open to the air, and Luther picks up his feet, stepping lightly over chunks of debris; it’s fresh enough to have not been snowed on, so this was recent damage, caused by someone who was just here. 

He vanishes inside, a minute ahead of the rest of his family, who crash in after him.

Diego’s the first to reach him, charging in with a knife drawn. He turns the corner, skidding on a smear of purple jelly, Vanya’s name in his mouth. 

He never says it. Instead, the sound that falls from his mouth is a gagging croak, when the stench hits him, rolling into him like a moving wall.

Luther has a hand clamped over his nose and mouth, is leaning unsteadily against the wall, his knees quivering. He’s standing in the shattered doorway of a room that’s bright red.

There’s a split second, where Diego doesn’t realize what he’s looking at, where he stares at the crimson walls and floors and thinks, _oh, only one of the rooms is painted._

Then, his seeing eye flits to Luther, to the greenish cast to his face, to the chunks on the floor that aren’t articles of discarded clothing, as he’d originally assumed. 

He stares down, at his foot, at the translucent purple material clinging to it. And he remembers where he’s seen this material before.

“Oh God,” he says. 

Then, the rest of the family come crashing in. Diego’s shoved roughly out of the way by the stampede, but he doesn’t mind, not really. He lets Allison shoulder him out of the way like a ragdoll, and then is there, to catch her as she staggers back in shock. Neither of them notice the violin case laying neatly in the corner, right in front of them. They're not really preoccupied with looking in shadowed corners, given what's right in front of them.

Five hears the cries of shock and disgust erupt from the bunker, and drops to a knee, to let Mr. Pennycrumb down from his sling, so he might be able to run inside. He seizes a sharp-edged rock from the rubble, convinced he’s running into a fight, and rounds the corner of the ragged hole.

Ben’s sprinting out, grazing his shoulder against Five’s roughly. His brother doesn’t bother to turn around to see what he’s doing; the visceral, wet sound of vomit slapping onto a rock takes care of that. Klaus passes Five, hurrying off after Ben, and the stench hits him, the sickly sweet odor of death, one that makes him choke and cough, reaching out to catch the burnt wall with his hand, to prevent himself from falling. His eyes are starting to water, and his heart is thudding in terror. He remembers the last time this stench had crawled into his nose; he remembers the fire, and the soot, and the bodies on top of bodies on top of bodies…

“It was her,” Allison’s gasping, like a fish. “It was her, that woman from the Hotel…”

“Lila?” Diego says. “I don’t…”

Five shoves his way past Diego and Allison, both pale as ghosts, to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with Luther, peering into the room.

Blood. Everywhere. Coating the floors, splashed up against the walls, soaking the sputtering lightbulbs. So much blood it can’t have come from just one person. And in the blood, scattered haphazardly across the room, the viscera, the blobbish remains of five or six or even seven shredded bodies…

“Is she…” Luther chokes, and can’t continue. He doesn’t need to.

Five’s heart jerks back in his chest, and he can feel his body moving traitorously against him, urging him to turn and run.

Instead, he digs his heels into the linoleum and stands firm, forcing him to take steady, heaving breaths. To stare right at the gore, to answer Luther’s question.

_Is Vanya here?_

So. He closes his eyes for a moment. He takes all the volatile, screaming feelings in him, and he lets them suck out of him, as if they were being consumed by a vacuum.

He opens his eyes.

Is. Vanya. Here?

A spill of long blonde hair, shining silver in the moonlight, slowly soaking through with red, the eyes of its owner burned out of her skull. Her jaw hangs open, lolling. Not Vanya.

A shape split down the middle, stinking of burnt meat, with an arm thrown over the wide hip of the blonde woman. The body’s head is burnt away, and much of its torso, but the silhouette is masculine, and the body is far larger than his favorite sister. Not Vanya. 

An angular, pale face, staring blankly ahead with round gray eyes, eyebrows lifted just slightly in the beginnings of surprise, a stray strand of mousy brown hair stuck to her forehead. The thin, spindly frame is cut off horizontally through the middle, clean as if a laser had done it. Not Vanya.

An elegant dark brown hand, splayed like a spider across the floor. Not Vanya’s. 

The suit of a heavyset man, sagging and full of a gushy substance Five can’t even identify, as though it’d been a balloon full of guts that had popped. Not Vanya. 

A blizzard of black feathers, floating in the blood, stuck to the walls and ceiling. Not Vanya.

No flash of platinum blonde-dyed hair. No calloused white hands. No small, slender form that is far skinnier than it ought to be. No round, solemn face, no dark, serious eyes. 

“No,” Five says, exhaling. “No, she’s _not.”_

He refuses to think about the possibility that there might not even be enough of Vanya to identify. She is not here, and therefore she is alive. He will find her. _They_ will find her. That is final. 

His heart won’t stop shaking. 

Luther gasps, nodding in gratitude, and he turns sharply, stumbling out of the doorway. Somewhere behind him, Mr. Pennycrumb is barking. 

Diego slides into the space his brother had left behind, tugging the collar of his shirt up and over his mouth and nose. “It’s them,” he says, studying the bodies. “All six, present and accounted for.” Already, he’s trying to imagine what had happened; the deep singed gouges in the walls suggest that the girl with laser eyes had attacked them, but she is among the dead, and not all of them bear the proper wounds. And besides, why would she turn on her own family?

He considers it a moment longer, and a bell rings in the back of his mind, calling back to months ago, when he’d been staring down a blizzard of broken glass and wood. The simplest answer is often the correct one, and he knows it, in the back of his mind. 

“Vanya did this,” he says quietly. 

Five looks at him, blinking.

“See?” Diego says, reaching out with a fine-fingered hand to guide Five’s gaze around the scene. “The Sparrows take Vanya. We find them all dead, but no Vanya. So, she killed them, and got away.”

“Deja vu,” Five mutters. He too remembers that morning in the Peabody house, though he isn’t so sure that it’s _true,_ in this case. There’s something that they aren’t seeing here, something obvious. It isn’t that Vanya wouldn’t be capable of such horrific violence-- after what he’s seen of her, he has no doubt that she is-- it’s that something about the configuration of this particular scene of violence doesn’t feel like it was inflicted by one person.

Five, on his way out of the bunker to join the others, who are spread out on a scattering of boulders, trips over that _something obvious._ He hisses, as his knees smash down in the fresh rubble, knowing he’s certainly torn them open. 

And stares. 

Down at the chunks of concrete wall that had been blown open. 

_If Vanya had been alone when she escaped, why bother tearing a hole through the wall, when she’d have just walked out through the door?_

Up, at the swath of dead spruce trees, splintered and stuck up haphazardly in the snow, like an enormous monster’s maw, ringed by rows of thin, serrated teeth. 

If the danger had ended, Five knows, Vanya would not have kept using her power, which surely must have been the only thing that caused this much destruction. 

Down again. At the small print of a sneaker, under his hand, and the larger, heavier imprint created by a boot. Two people, racing off out of the ruins. Someone else is here. Someone else had gone off with Vanya. 

_They were running,_ he thinks, pulling himself to his feet and following the trail, judging the spaces between the strides. They were running together, or one of them was chasing the other...

Behind him, his siblings sit spread out across the moon-soaked snow, raking in lungfuls of chilled air as they try their hardest to remove the taste of death from their mouths. One would think they’d be used to it, given their respective upbringings, but there’s something utterly horrible about the scene inside, something disturbingly fresh about the bodies of the siblings who had never quite been their siblings. 

Klaus sits, with Mr. Pennycrumb in his lap, rubbing circles into the puppy’s warm, broad chest with his quivering hands. He doesn’t like dogs, “but you know, maybe this one’s okay,” he’s saying to Luther, who whips up a hand and shushes him.

Thunder. The same thunder they’d heard, echoing strangely off the mountainsides.

Or… no. It’s _not_ thunder, is it? How can there be thunder, if the moon is shining down upon them, and there isn’t a single cloud in the sky?

 _For that matter,_ he thinks, _how was it snowing?_

Unless it hadn’t been snowing. Unless the snow hadn’t been falling from the sky, but was blown in by strange folds of wind…

“It’s not wind,” he realizes aloud, as a high, shivering cry sweeps past them, making the snow around their feet ripple, and their hair quiver.

Now that he’s said it, each and every one of his siblings feels it too; they’ve felt this before, this strange, silvery resonance reaching out with invisible fingers to rake at them and everything around them. They know exactly who it is, who’s causing it. They know that Vanya is out there, somewhere down the side of the mountain, tearing into the sky with her power.

But there's _another_ one, another presence intermingled furiously with Vanya's, reaching out and pressing clumsily at them, a presence that they've never quite felt like this, but feels familiar somehow...

"Lila," Diego says.

They start running.

* * *

The attack, for what it’s worth, had begun on two fronts. Neither assailant had planned for the other’s involvement, and neither much cared. For a moment, their interests aligned, and when faced with the prospect of fighting one person or six, they both had individually determined that the six were a greater threat, and therefore the more important to dispose of quickly. 

It’s really down to luck, that they’d both attacked at the same instant. 

The Sparrow Academy hardly had time to look up from their discussion, before the beam of blinding light came burning through one doorway, and the roar of razor-sharp music had rushed in through the other. 

And, what’s more, because they’d attacked at the very same instant, neither Lila nor Vanya can say who is responsible for the carnage. 

They both had their reasons, of course. 

Lila had been frothing with anger at her rejection, determined to make them feel as raw and terrible as she did. After all, the Umbrella Academy couldn’t take this thing from her, if it was not there to take. So she had decided to burn her fields, and salt the earth behind her.

And Vanya had been feeling nothing at all, nothing save a cold, steely resolve that had sunk into her bones and stayed there when she’d first realized exactly what her dreams with Carla had been leading towards. She had come here, knowing that she would kill them, that the only way she would ever be safe, was when her family’s pursuers were dead. 

So. They did it.

The mist of blood hadn’t faded, when Lila and Vanya had stared at each other across the room, two apex predators sizing each other up, weighing the cost of the fight.

Lila, ankle-deep in the blood of the family that she could have had, the family that the skinny little woman across from her had taken and _ruined,_ gave in to the urge to open her veins with sharpened nails, and _lunged._

And Vanya had run, shearing a hole through the wall with a single stroke of her bow across her strings. She needed to get outside, to have an open sky above her, so if her powers went wide, she’d not have to worry about debris pouring down upon her head.

Her family don’t take long to find her. They just follow the cacophonous crashing echoing up from further down the mountain slope, like the crack of weapons wielded by gods, locked in a fight to the death. 

At long last, Lila has had more than a split-second taste of Vanya’s power, and _oh,_ is it wonderful. It surges in her from within, making her blood purr and her lips curl up in an almost drunken smile. She suddenly understands perfectly well how a person could destroy the world with it; of _course_ a person would, when the world could crumble to ash in their hands, just for the sake of doing it. She has no practice in it, but she has a general sense of how it works, and far more importantly, she could truly care less about how much damage she is causing, beating shelves of rock from the sides of mountains to waterfall down on her rival’s head, whipping trees from the earth and shaking snow loose from clouds. All that matters is the woman in front of her, who must be obliterated if Lila is ever to have anything of her own. 

Vanya is inexperienced and hesitant, deeply reluctant to unleash the full extent of her power, but with her violin in her hands, she is quick and precise, shearing apart the things Lila flings at her. She keeps her feet planted firmly on the ground, crouched in as defensive a position as she can manage, searching for some sort of opening, with which to attack or else to flee, but the tsunami waves of destruction just keep _hitting._

Lila feels a prickling on the edge of her senses, but it’s so far away and unimportant, in the face of this wonderful power she’s holding, this power that’s so great that she can feel it swelling within her, enough power to send a tsunami of energy across the entire world…

And then, the freezing pain, as Diego whips a snowball in a wide, curving arc, to nail her directly in the face. 

There’s no time to consider reaching out and extending a hand to her, not with half a dozen corpses behind them, and with Lila glowing with apocalyptic energy at her fingertips, frothing at the mouth for his sister’s blood. 

Lila twists, turning to regard the Umbrella Academy with deep, seething hatred flaring in her, brighter than a star. Of course, the rest of Vanya’s litter has arrived. Of course they’re here. In fact, they’ve probably planned this, haven’t they, they’ve planned to lure her out here, to get her alone, so they can kill her...

Panic scrapes at her, like a bow against strings, as she glances wildly, from one enemy to the next. There are seven of them, and there’s only her, and this isn’t fair, how is she possibly going to handle them all at _once…_

Oh. She’s got it. She’s _got_ it. 

Lila doubles over, her arms twisting around her middle and her spine creaking with the sudden appearance of a weight it has never been forced to carry before. 

“Oh fuck,” Ben says reflexively, a cold spike of dread shooting down his spine. He knows _exactly_ what she's about to unleash.

The thing about Ben’s power is that it’s a toss of the coin, only to be used at the last possible resort. It can clear an entire room full of hostiles, no matter their armor, no matter their weapons, in five seconds flat. But, every time Ben had unleashed his monsters, he’d always had to be careful to ensure that no one he cared about was remotely within the range of his longest tentacles, always had to grit his teeth and hold back, to ensure nothing would push all the way through, lest it would tunnel out _through_ him; sure, you can free yourself of all your enemies in a single blow, but you may well take everyone you care about with you. Maybe even yourself. 

Lila tosses her coin, betting on heads, in the hopes that it might destroy all of her enemies at once. 

It lands on tails. 

Each of the Hargreeves siblings catches a glimpse of the sight of Lila’s body, blooming from the inside out, like a horrible fleshy flower, as the tentacles burst out in a hurricane of whiplike, razor-toothed tentacles.

It happens so quickly, they don’t even feel it. 

They’re all standing, staring at a bright red blur whipping their way, and then they’re all flat on their backs in the snow, staring up at the stars, or across the snow at their companions, if they’re lucky enough to be able to stare at all.

All of a sudden, it’s quiet, so quiet that Five can hear the tinny barking of his puppy far up the slope, where he’d instructed him to sit and stay and wait for their return. 

Which, he realizes, isn’t going to come, is it? 

There’s a hole in his abdomen, and his guts are spilled across the snow, steam rising from the wound. He can't feel his feet at all, trying to imagine his feet twitching, but only looking down and seeing no sign of movement at all. Five twists his head, grimacing in the worst agony he’s ever felt, like every cell in his body is on fire, like a million freezing needles are digging into his skin, triggering sparks of light behind his eyes. He’s trembling, and he can’t stop himself, hot tears spilling from his eyes.

He doesn’t see a single sign of movement among his family. Six scattered figures, laying limply, blots of color against the snow, which has been stained red, and crisscrossed by the pinkish worms of intestines. 

He's fending off panic, gulping harsh, staccato breaths, feeling the thundering of his heart in his chest as it traitorously pumps blood out onto the snow. 

Already, the stars above him are beginning to spin, and as a final sort of proof that he’s being sucked down to hell, he can hear his father’s voice clanging in the back of his mind, sneering about how he’d always bitten off more than he could chew, how he’d set all this into motion by charging off into the future, by skipping seconds and leaping straight through decades…

Wait.

He’s got it. 

Five curls his hands into fists, tighter, tighter, until his knuckles are white, until his fingers strain from the strength of his grip, and he scrapes together the last bit of power he has, gritting his teeth through the pain and reaching through to snatch the wheel of time, and roll it back, not decades, but _seconds._

He gives it everything, and everything is enough.

Five feels his insides scuttle back into his gut, his skin zipping shut as the bright red whip of tentacle flashes backwards. He is rising, lifted backwards as the force that had driven him to the ground is being revoked, tugging him up onto his heels.

Five floats to his feet, and _runs,_ his feet digging deep into the snow, pushing hard, as though he were attempting to run across the floor of the ocean.

He moves, nonetheless, watching his family whirl around him through a veil of blue light, like figures in a strange music box, their entrails slithering back into their bodies and the light returning to their eyes, the _life_ returning to their bodies. All around him, the snow falls upwards. 

Just a little bit further...

He stumbles over in the snow, just to Lila’s left, just as the very first tentacle is tearing loose from her gut and slicing past Luther. Five can see the blobs of crimson hanging in the air, feathering away from Luther’s body like strange birds…

_Just a little bit further…_

But then, no more. Then, Five stumbles, feeling his power flicker out of his reach. His knees hit the ground, and he hears the sounds around him judder back to their normal speed, the slice of the tentacle through his brother’s body lasting half a second.

Five is close enough to touch, and he doesn’t have enough in him to jump, but he can most certainly make one last leap.

Five snatches a handful of snow off the ground, and, for lack of a better plan, he takes a note from Diego, and simply smashes it into the side of her face.

It works. Lila shrieks at the bite of the cold, and loses focus, blinking the ice out of her eyes. 

And that is enough. The first tentacle that licks out of her body retreats, spasming, into her gut, as if it were the forked tongue of a snake. Ben's power has always required intense concentration, and with it broken, Lila can no longer maintain the portal between their world and wherever it is that the monsters hail from. 

Five grins in triumph. It doesn’t last long. 

Lila whips around, driving her fist up into Five’s gut so hard and fast that he gags and doubles over, stumbling to the ground.

Beyond him, he realizes, Luther is still down. He’s still sprawled across the ground, and… and there’s a deep laceration in his side. 

And Five had run out his clock too early to save all of his siblings. 

Too late. He’s too late. He’s _too late._

Black spots are shimmering in his vision, and he feels so utterly drained that he cannot muster the energy to pull himself off his knees. 

Above him, and far enough away that he cannot lunge from her from where he is crouched over on the ground, trying very hard not to pass out, Lila is panting heavily. Her eyes are bulging from their sockets, veins popping and shivering grotesquely beneath her skin like indigo worms. Her irises flash white, and her skin starts to glow from within, all color draining from it as...

Then, her eyes fix on something just beyond them, and she becomes a very different sort of pale.

Five blinks, trying to displace the blue flashes in his vision.

But he can’t. Instead, they grow sharper and more distinct, no longer strange amorphous blobs of leaping light, but the outlines of six _people,_ of…

Oh.

Just beyond Lila, Five spots Klaus crouched over, his fists a pair of beacons flashing blue light. He can’t make out his face, from this far away, but something tells Five that Klaus is grinning like a jackal, as he watches the freshly-dead Sparrow Academy flicker into corporeality, staring down one of their killers with utter contempt. 

Lila had never bothered to try Klaus’s power. She’d always found the idea of mediumship rather useless. 

(Well. So much for that.)

She stares, at the wide, burnt gouge carved through One’s chest, at the popped seam in Six’s gut, at the vicious glare in Four’s eyes, which flicker from dark to eerily pale, in preparation of unleashing a beam of ferocious energy that will scour right through her. 

Lila feels sheer, visceral terror corkscrewing in her gut. She wants them to disappear. She wants them to _leave,_ she...

She screams it, so loudly that her lungs quiver, and the sound leaves her in a relentless roar, cresting up the mountain and breaking loose a wave of snow, that begins barreling down towards them. 

It works, distracting Klaus so much that the ghosts he’s called up sputter out of sight. 

But then, when the ground trembles beneath Lila’s feet, she realizes what she’s done.

They have maybe five seconds, before the avalanche reaches them, and in those seconds, the siblings scramble towards each other. Lila stands right where she is, and in the moment before the white washes over Five, he sees her head snap to look at him, her eyes flashing. He can almost see the lightbulb flicking on in her mind, and knows exactly whose power she’s taking.

Then, the wave is upon him, knocking him flat on his back and burying him and the rest of his family in a tide of snow.

When they dig themselves out, she’s gone.

* * *

All around Klaus, the snow is packed in tight, the cold of it seeping into his bare arms and making him feel as cold inside as it is outside, as cold as a corpse. It’s dark, and quiet, and very tomb-like, and if he weren’t acutely alive and panicking, he might actually consider staying here for a while. Maybe he’d contemplate his life choices, or meditate, or try astral projection. 

He never gets the chance to consider anything else, because then, the snow crumbles away from his face, and silver starlight falls down on him.

Diego’s hands are on his shoulders, under his armpits, hoisting him up, and he kicks with his legs, to help in the extraction. Diego hauls him up with a heavy grunt, crumpling to his knees under Klaus’s weight, and once he’s waist-deep, the snow around him is loose enough to kick free of. 

Klaus stares around wildly, and counts heads: One, sticking out of the snow further away, wheezing. Two, with his arms around Klaus’s waist. Three, crawling on her hands and knees towards Luther, at whose side Five is already kneeling. Six, hunched over and clutching his middle, green in the face. And Seven, standing above them all, her hair flying over her shoulder as she whips around and rushes for Luther.

“We’re all okay,” he pants, a bright smile tearing across his face. 

In a moment of sheer jubilation at the realization-- they are all alive, and their enemy has vanished in a flash, which means they will _stay_ alive-- Klaus feels himself overflowing with it, so hungry to share it with someone. And Diego is just… well, he’s right there. At least, that’s what he’s thinking at the time. It’s a lot more than _just_ that, but he’s hardly in a state of mind to think about that. 

So Klaus grabs him by the shoulders, wrenches him around, and kisses him. It lasts for a second, just a second, but he still feels him kiss back, feels his hands reach up to cradle his face.

They break apart, and there’s a moment where they stare at each other, each a little uncertain of what the other is thinking, each worried that it’d only been a moment of temporary insanity.

Then, a soft smile crawls across Diego’s face, the kind of smile a person gets when they finally understand something that’s been just out of reach for the longest time, and Klaus knows that it’s a lot more than the spur of the moment that’d motivated the both of them. 

They break into laughter, leaning against each other, arms slung loosely around each other’s shoulders for a moment, before they remember the rest of their family.

Ben watches it all, wondering exactly how much had transpired between the two of them in his absence. There’s a flare of jealousy burning bright and hot in him for a split second, and strangely, it isn’t focused on solely Klaus. 

But never mind that. Their brother is wounded. 

Five’s rewind had only stretched so far, and Luther had fallen just outside of that limit. While not dead by any means, there is still a deep laceration in his side, drawn by the monster that had ripped out of Lila, and there’s a bloom of blood spreading across the snow around him, shockingly red. He’s breathing, sharp and fast and uneven, staring up at the starry sky above him, trying to trace lines between them, trying to place the constellations and recall the myths behind them, trying to focus on anything at all that will keep him awake.

A dozen hands are pressed tightly around it, and already, Klaus and Diego are whipping off their shirts and tearing them into bandages, which are being tied tightly around his middle. Six voices are crying out, one over the next, tangling together in a roar of noise, calling out:

“... the nearest hospital...”

“... no one’s here for _miles...”_

“... someone run down to the bunker and get bandages...”

“... hang on, okay, just hang on, you’re gonna be fine, big guy…”

“... God, Luther, I’m so _sorry,_ I couldn’t go any further...”

And in the center of that storm of noise, lightning strikes.

Allison doesn’t mean anything by it, when she says it. It just slips out, borne out of her on a wave of icy panic that stabs through her like an icicle. 

But she says it.

**“I heard a rumor that you stopped bleeding.”**

And everyone goes quiet. 

Slowly, tentatively, the swarm of hands pulls back.

The makeshift bandages, already saturated with blood, simply don’t overflow. The hideous bloody bloom doesn’t spread its petals any wider. Luther’s breaths even out. 

They gape, as if they just watched water turn to wine in front of their eyes.

Which, well. They kind of _have._

“All _right,_ Allison!” Klaus says, breaking the silence to sling an arm around her and squeeze.

They set the shock aside, for a moment. There’ll be time to discuss Whatever Just Happened later, when their brother isn’t bleeding out on a mountainside.

It takes all six of them to carry, well, _drag_ Luther uphill to the bunker.

But they manage, staggering inside and tracking through their family’s blood on the way, dragging hideous prints across the linoleum, which is the color of a half-rotted tangerine, and skirting around the insistent barking shape of Mr. Pennycrumb, who had dutifully sat and stayed as he had been bade to do, and had been rewarded for his efforts with sheer bedlam, and one of his favorite people in horrific condition, which had sent the puppy into a panic.

Being back here is hardly anyone’s first choice, but there isn’t anyone for miles upon miles, and there is medical equipment here that they can use to keep their brother alive, which they can do far better indoors than on a slope, so they grit their teeth, ignore the mess at the end of the hall, and roll up their sleeves.

It requires disinfectant, and stitches, and a cauterization, which causes Diego to tap out immediately and be placed on puppysitting duty, and even then, Luther is still pale as death. Which means...

“We’re going to need a transfusion,” Ben says.

“You’re sure?”

“I mean, I’m not a doctor, but… I think? That sounds right, right?”

“Oh my God,” mutters Luther. “I’m dead. I’m so dead.”

“Shut up,” hisses Five.

“Shit,” curses Klaus. “We don’t have Pogo with us.”

“Why would we need _Pogo?”_

“To give blood? Remember what he said about Luther? He’s an ape man, he can’t use any of our blood.”

Five twists his face, then perks up. He starts rolling back his sleeve. “Try me.”

Vanya and Ben follow his command, albeit with confusion scrawled across their faces. 

“Five and Luther are twins,” Diego explains, when he catches their looks of befuddlement.

“... _What?”_ squawks Klaus. “When did _that_ happen?”

“When they were born,” snarks Diego.

“Diego,” Ben says, “Turn around. I don’t want you passing out on top of me while I stick this tube in Five’s arm.”

Diego turns white, and obeys.

The transfusion is successful enough, and Luther is left to retire on a cot in the corner of the barebones bedroom, which has not a single scrap of furniture, much to everyone's dismay. Allison chooses to join him, dragging a cot with an ear-piercing metallic groan across the room and squeezing it next to his, with no space between them. 

She crawls right up next to him, and watches him for a while, staring at his newly-dressed wound in awe, recalling what she had done to it.

And she had done it. She’d watched his eyes turn to milky glass, and then he had simply… stopped bleeding. 

Allison racks her brain, scouring her memories for anything that might explain what on earth she’s just done.

And the thing is, she’s said things like this before. She’d sit in the infirmary after a horrific sprain and whisper to herself that she **heard a rumor that her foot would be okay,** or stare at her underwear in utter disgust and **hear a rumor that her period is over.** But when her foot had healed perfectly, and her period had ended a few days early, she hadn’t thought anything of it; she had no way of knowing it would work, or that it had been her voice that had caused it, and had only ever said it as a way to comfort herself. 

She had no reason to think it would; Dad had explored her power so thoroughly, she’d thought, and he’d been careful to tell her her limitations, that her power was strictly limited to the realm of the possible, to the theatre of the mind, and forcing the hand of a person’s behavior. 

Perhaps it had all been coincidence. Perhaps it had been her all along.

She thinks back, to Dallas. To JFK. To the heart attack she’d given him.

She hadn’t just rumored his mind, she’d rumored his _body._ Or, she’d rumored his mind to command his body, which is essentially the same thing. 

And it had been possible, is the thing. It had been perfectly possible for a middle-aged man’s heart to suddenly stop beating. 

… It would have been possible for a young, healthy teenage girl’s sprained foot to heal perfectly. It would have been possible for a young woman’s period to stop a few days ahead of schedule. 

“My _God,”_ Allison whispers, to no one at all. 

How many times had she done this, how many times had she commanded her body, or the bodies of others, without even knowing it? Has her power grown, or has she simply discovered a new facet of it, one so subtle she’d never realized was there before? How long has she been able to rumor _biology,_ as well as behavior?

She doesn’t know. She just doesn’t know.

And honestly, it doesn’t matter, because it’s here now, it's a part of her, and she must learn to understand it.

Luther is here, beside her, and he will live. He will heal, and he will live, and everything will be okay. She pulls him closer to her, and plants a kiss on his temple, and runs her fingers through his hair, and nuzzles his cheek, and feels his large heart beating slowly under her hand as it skims across his chest. He will be okay; she has guaranteed it.

Though she had curled up at his side with the intentions of sitting vigil over him while he slept, Allison finds herself passing into a very deep slumber almost immediately, an arm thrown across his waist. 

(Before she does, she leans over, gently shakes Luther awake enough to look to her, and whispers, **“I heard a rumor that you’re going to live.”** Just to be sure.)

Five is the only other inhabitant of the room, too suspicious of the effects the transfusion had on his body to try sleeping; the woozy cloud floating in his mind is simply his body being weak, and not tiredness. He is reclining, not quite lying, not quite sitting, on a cot piled high with blankets, with Mr. Pennycrumb curled in a tight tan ball in his lap, sleeping contentedly as his master gives him the gentlest of head massages. 

(Privately, Mr. Pennycrumb has already decided that Luther is better at this than Five; Luther is much larger, and warmer, and his fingers are superior at finding the itchy places that Mr. Pennycrumb’s legs fail to reach. However, seeing as Luther is out like a light, he has opted to settle for his second favorite head scratcher.)

So Five is awake, when Vanya comes shuffling nervously into the doorway, peering in with her instrument in her hands. For a moment, Five feels like he’s twelve again, and she’s peeking through the infirmary doorway after a mission, nervously wondering if she’s allowed in to speak to him. It’s a nice thought.

“How are you?” Vanya asks, quietly, so as not to wake their siblings. 

Five looks up at her, feeling his chest flood with warmth at the sight of her. “I’ll live,” he says, the corner of his mouth tweaking up purposefully, to try and assuage her worries by making it look as though giving a significant portion of his blood in a rather unprofessional transfusion is just the sort of thing he does all the time.

“That’s good,” Vanya says, taking his smile as permission to cross the room and settle at his side. The lights in this room are off, and the silver shine of the moon peeks through the narrow window that runs the length of the room. A bright bar of light spears through the shadow on the floor, and Vanya passes through it, flashing just for a moment as bright as she’d been out in the snow with her power thrumming through her. 

She kneels on the floor beside the low cot where he’s reclining, tugging her violin case from where it sat, forgotten, and kicked out of the way during the chaos. She places her violin and bow lovingly back into the case, smoothing her fingers along the curve of the wood, before closing the case and fastening it, sliding it carefully under the cot beside Five's. She folds her arms on the edge of his own cot, and they brush up against Five’s side, just enough to make his breath catch. 

Five moves his fingers slowly in a rhythmic circle over Mr. Pennycrumb’s head, and Vanya reaches up, tentatively, to run her fingers through the puppy’s short fur. 

He is staring off towards the room where Vanya had killed their siblings. From here, only a faint smear of red is visible. He could pretend it is paint, if he wanted to. He doesn’t. 

“Are you alright?” he asks.

“What do you mean?”

“You were alone up here for a while.”

Vanya’s hair falls out from behind her ear, sweeping into her face. “I’m okay now.”

“You shouldn’t have had to do that,” he says. “You shouldn’t have been alone.” He swallows. “And I… I shouldn’t have left you. I’m _sorry,_ that you had to do that.” 

His fingertips brush up against her hand, and they dance apart, as if they’d each reached into a fire by mistake. 

Vanya’s heart shudders, but she takes a slow, deep breath. 

She’s done a horrifying thing. But she isn’t crying, isn’t shaking with disgust at herself, isn’t curled into a ball and waiting to sleep and forget about it. She feels utterly calm. Not proud, not even satisfied, but at a strange sort of peace, the sort of peace that one feels when one knows that one’s enemies are well and truly dead, and that one is finally safe after a long period of terror. 

“I did it,” Vanya says, tugging her hair out of her face, and back behind her ears. “I did it for you. For all of you.” 

Five’s fingers brush up against hers, rolling over her knuckles to skim lightly over the top of her palm. 

She doesn’t pull away again. Neither does he.

“Do you regret it?”

Vanya considers it. “No.”

She closes her hand over his.

He nods, ever so slightly, feeling a rush of terrible pride swell in him. “You shouldn’t.”

The corners of her lips perk up in a sad smile.

Five’s hand slips down, past hers, to the delicate bones of her wrist. He catches it gently, tugging it up to him and turning it, bringing his free hand up to peel back the corner of her sleeve to expose her thin, pale forearm, still speckled with blood, and the faded mark stamped into it. 

She folds her hand around his own.

“I’m sorry,” she says. “About Delores.” Her cheeks are burning, and she wants to look away, to bury her face in her hands, but she pushes through. It’s an odd time, but there never seems to be a _right time,_ and she has to clear this up between them. “I just… I made a mess of things. It’s nothing at all, and it made me so upset. I was being stupid.”

Five sighs. “No, you weren’t. We should’ve cleared this up a long time ago. I was keeping her from you because I was afraid of how you’d respond. To knowing I was with someone.”

Vanya nods quietly. “What was it like?”

Five draws the pad of his thumb gently, carefully across the faded umbrella, tracing a rusty splotch of dried blood blotted over it. 

Five contemplates, for a moment. “Delores and I… Well, I found her, after the apocalypse, and I was with her for decades. She kept me sane, all those years. The mind does strange things, when you’re alone, and I… well. I needed comfort. I needed a confidante, and she provided that.”

Vanya nods, her mouth pressed into a tense, worried line.

His thumb stops moving, so Vanya looks up at him. She finds that he is staring at her.

It’s important, it’s _vital,_ that she understands this, if they are going to have what he sincerely hopes she wants as much as he does, so he waits until her eyes are fixed on him, and then continues: “That time I spent with Delores, it mattered a great deal to me. But it’s over now, and I treasure those years I spent with her, but I’ll never return to them. I never even want to entertain doing it. I always intended to come _back,_ you know.”

 _To you,_ he doesn’t say.

Somehow, she hears it. She’s always been adept at sifting through his words to pluck out what he hasn’t said. It’s a skill she’s been developing ever since they were ten, and had first formed a friendship; it had started out of spite, out of Five, furious that Dad wouldn’t let him try jumping into the future, snatching Seven by the hand and declaring he’d spend time with her that Saturday, specifically because he’d known it would make him furious.

Very soon, it had not been out of spite at all. 

Five holds her gaze, and leans in, pressing his dry lips to the mark. He can feel her pulse leap. He’s pressing up against a very delicate boundary, but he has to. He needs to make his intentions clear. 

Vanya’s eyes widen, and her breath catches. She understands. 

“You won’t leave anymore?”

She’s referring to a lot of things, he knows. To running out and into the future, without so much as thinking to take her with him, a thing he'd done in _two_ timelines now. To sneaking out of her apartment when she’d had her back turned. To turning away when she’d come calling. To bouncing back and forth across the country unannounced.

 _Is it any wonder,_ he thinks, _that you’re so angry? I keep running and running and running, and it’s always ending in disaster. All you’ve ever wanted of me was to stay. And if I had, everything would have been fine, wouldn’t it?_

He bows his head. “I wasn’t planning on leaving, at least not permanently.”

“Well, why did you do it then?”

A sense of duty to the world and to his family. Of rigid self-reliance cultivated from decades of isolation. And, well...

“I wanted to be important,” he says. “I wanted to be everywhere. I wanted to save everyone. I wanted them to know it was me, who was looking after them, who was finding all the answers and keeping everyone safe. I wanted to be the person who brings us all together.” Five sighs, finally bringing the thing he’s been circling for weeks out into the open, giving it form with words: “But I’m _not,_ am I?”

The Umbrella Academy were raised to be an organism, to be a group of organs within a single body, working in unison to achieve a singular goal. 

The Sparrow Academy, before they’d been imploded of course, had been raised similarly. In their father’s absence, they’d had the freedom to sort out among themselves who was best suited to occupy which role. 

The Umbrella Academy had no such luxury. It’s not that the idea itself had been wrong; it’s that their father had misidentified their roles within the entity, cramming them into molds in which they did not fit. 

Allison, for instance, had always cared little for defusing her brothers’ spats, having participated in more than her own fair share of her own, and had hardly been the heart their father had wanted her to be. For another, Klaus, too flighty and inconstant, and only ever consistently faithful to the worst of his instincts, could never have possibly made for a good gut. 

_And Luther,_ Five thinks, gazing upon his brother, across the room, noting the gentle rise and fall of his immense chest as he dozes. _The spine who’d been taught to be spineless._

Five’s own role, the one he thinks of now, had been that of hand, a creature of action to be sent out first and foremost to scout and fight. And a part of him had enjoyed that very much. The rest of him had been furious, that because of what his father had decided he must be, he would never be listened to when he presented his ideas. 

In fact, he reflects, a large part of why he’d been chomping at the bit to leave had been his determination to prove he wasn’t just a dog to be sent out to fetch; that he could think for himself, that he could devise for himself a path of his own.

And well. He had. Just not the one he’d been hoping for. 

At any rate, the lot of them had been smothered by these roles they’d been forced into. Only now, without their father breathing down their necks, they’re finally begun finding their proper places. 

Five had hoped, privately, that the one he would slip into would be that of the team’s core, the sun around which everyone evolved, that bound them together and kept them on their steady orbits. He's not.

“And I’m alright with that,” he says truthfully, because now, looking at Vanya, he understands. _No wonder we were all so fucked-up,_ he thinks. _We’d been missing a heart._ “Because it’s you, Vanya. It’s always been you, and we’re all so fucked because we haven’t been able to see it.”

“I…” Vanya’s brow twists, and Five can see her retreating into herself again.

“Listen to me,” he insists, “You’re it. You’re a part of us. You’ve always belonged, and you always will, and nothing in the world can ever change that. Never doubt that again, okay?” 

He tightens his grip on her hand, and she lets him. 

“Okay.”

It's quiet for a moment, and Vanya can hear Five's heart skipping irregularly, the way hearts do when their owners are troubled by something.

"What is it?" she asks.

"What?" he asks, a twinge of worry to his voice. 

"Something's wrong. Tell me."

Five furrows his brow, staring at the steady rise and fall of Mr. Pennycrumb's back, trying to think it through. His eyes are so, so heavy in their sockets, and he can feel sleep tugging him down like an anchor, but if he falls asleep, he might see...

"I saw you die."

"What?"

"Tonight. When we were fighting her. I..." Five swallows. "I saw you all die. When she had Ben's power, when she hit Luther... Well. She didn't _just_ hit Luther."

Vanya's gut clenches. She remembers that flash of vicious red, remembers seeing Five... _appear,_ so close to Lila, remembers wondering how he'd gotten there so quickly, and without a flash...

"You time traveled, didn't you?"

"Yes." 

"Because we... Was it bad?"

"It was." Five's hand is shaking. "I..." He laughs once, sharp and hacking. "I can't keep doing this. I can't keep seeing you all like this." He can't get the images out of his head, of each and every one of his siblings, splayed out across the snow in pieces. Scattered across the smoking ruined cityscape.

"Should I stay here?"

It's stupid of him, to think Vanya's presence will be enough to chase away the possibility of those images reappearing when he sleeps, but maybe... well. It would help. 

"Yeah. Yeah, I'd... Thanks."

Vanya nods. She leans in, resting her head against his shoulder, and there she stays, closing her eyes and casting out her senses, to feel for her family’s heartbeats. She knows them well enough now to tell them apart, and takes great comfort in it: Luther’s heavy, slow plod, across the room, overlapped with the softer buzz of Allison’s, skipping a bit in sleep, perhaps to a particularly intense dream. The steady pound of Diego’s, down the hall, intermingled with Klaus’s slightly irregular skitter and Ben’s quick sluicing. The humming thunder just under her ear, that she settles in to get a closer listen to. And, a seventh, smaller, quicker one she is less familiar with, that makes her smile fondly, and reach up to gently squeeze the paw of its owner. 

In the hour she’d spent since the panicked first aid session, she had followed in the footsteps of her brothers who were still on their feet.

Klaus, Ben, Diego and she had braced themselves, gone into that room of death, and gone picking up the pieces of their siblings, wrapping them in spare shirts and blankets they’d found in lockers lining the walls, and carrying them outside, to bury them. Vanya feels sick, at the thought that there’d been so little to bury, that they’d inevitably mixed body parts together, but some odd, instinctual part of her recalls her brief time with the Sparrows on her journey across the Atlantic, and she gets the sense that this wouldn’t have displeased them. 

They decided against scrubbing the floors and walls. None of them have the energy for it, and once Vanya had seen the last hunk of splintered bone removed from the floor, she’d gone to Five, leaving the rest of her brothers to explore the bunker on their own. 

Ben, Klaus and Diego, since their separation from Vanya, have taken to picking through the lockers and cabinets, wandering through the industrial kitchen and investigating the utilitarian shower. 

They’re in what they consider to be the closest thing to a living room as the bunker has, peering at its contents. 

The events that had unfolded on the mountainside are not forgotten, merely set aside. Later, they’ll piece through this tangled triangle. For now, they’re too tired to bother, too reluctant to ignite something that could so easily turn to another conflict. 

It’s easier, to flip through notepads of chemical formulas, and to take their socks off and hang them to dry over the heater, and to read the world map with the dozen little pins stuck in it hanging over the bench bolted into the far wall. They’re finding nothing particularly useful, but it’s nice, puttering around and pretending they’re doing something. 

Ben settles in to page through a series of dull-looking reports in a file cabinet, beneath a stack of maps, while Diego grimly carries a mop and bleach down the hall, to set outside the Room No One Will Enter, for later use. 

Klaus has been fiddling with the television for about ten minutes, before he cries out in triumph, as it buzzes to life. It fills the bunker with much-needed white noise, the harmless sound of a foreign news station chattering about the weather, and about city ordinances. 

And… about them.

Klaus drops to his knees in front of the glowing box, staring into it intensely, patting his cheek a few times to be sure he isn’t just hallucinating the now-too-familiar sight of his face in a domino mask, beside his siblings in a building he’s never been in. 

He is not. The newscaster is, in fact, discussing the Umbrella Academy.

Klaus cranks up the volume, and his doing so draws the attention of his brother. 

“What’s happening?” asks Diego, leaning in beside him.

Klaus purses his lips in concentration. He can’t speak Norwegian, but he can sort of make out the words; he’d been the best at picking out languages, well, him and Allison, anyway. 

“We’re… clear?”

“What?”

“We’re clear. The hunt’s done. Our names are clear.”

“So no one’s coming after us anymore?”

“I… guess not. Huh.”

A part of Klaus wants to ask why, to marvel at this wonderful miracle, to crow about how the universe at last has decided to throw him a damn bone. 

The far more cynical part of Klaus, the one that's been in the driver's seat for most of his life, knows better.

“Dad did this,” he says out loud, and Diego grumbles in agreement. 

“He wants us back,” his brother replies. 

“Why would…” Klaus’s eyes sweep up, to the corner of the bunker, to the shattered hunk of technology he can’t identify, which has what he can clearly make out to be a camera lens nestled within it. It’s broken beyond the point of repair, even from a distance he can tell that, but it must’ve been destroyed with the rest of the chaos.

Which means… “He knows what happened here.”

Klaus is correct. Sir Reginald had observed the deaths of his second family from the safe vantage point of their robot caretaker’s camera eyes and, upon seeing that they had failed him, and upon deducing that his wayward children would certainly follow their sister to Norway, and stumble across the bunker and its contents, he had coldly decided that rebellious children who might be lured back into the fold were better than no children at all. So he had made a few calls, more than a few bribes, and gone about changing the narrative he had created in the first place. 

Sir Reginald expects them to come home. And they will. They just don’t know it yet.

“Shit,” Diego breathes. 

Klaus turns the television off. It’s appeal has soured considerably. 

“We should tell them,” he says. “That we can go back, if we want.”

“Yeah.” Diego replies, running a hand through his hair. Both of them are well-versed enough in how the media works, thanks to their upbringing, to know that it has a notoriously short attention span. In a week or two, no one will think a thing of their fugitivehood. 

Diego gives Klaus a hand up, and the two of them begin padding slowly down to join the rest of the family. They’ve only just entered the room, when Ben comes skidding in, shedding loose paper from a pile he has stacked in his arms.

“This is insane,” he’s saying.

“Right? We can go home.”

“No?” Ben says. “What?”

There’s a rustle, as Allison perks up grumpily and stares at them, rubbing her bleary eye with the heel of her hand. She looks very miffed that they've interrupted her big spooning session, but once their conversation registers, she blinks and leans in, reaching down to tap at Luther's shoulder.

“Dad cleared our names,” Diego explains, “We can technically go back to the States and no one will arrest us. What are _you_ talking about?”

“Them. The Sparrows. They know so much about us.”

“Yeah,” Klaus pipes up, “Who we are, how we fight, what our powers are. God, I always knew Dad played favorites, but it really does suck, that even in an alternate universe, I’m not one of them--” 

“No,” Ben says. “I mean. They know where we _come_ from.”

“What?” asks Luther, groggily. 

“This,” Ben says, waving a fat binder full of old, deeply-creased, typewritten paper, which Klaus dodges being clipped in the forehead by. “Dad gave them info on where we’re all from. Them, and us too. You saw that map in the living room, right?”

A chorus of nods and _yeah-I-guesses._ They’d all vaguely glimpsed it, but it hadn’t exactly been much of a priority at the time. 

“Well, it’s of us. Of where we _come from._ Guys, I found our birth mothers.”

He’s said the magic words, the ones that cast a spell on the Umbrella Academy and silences them completely, that has Luther and Five sitting up sharply to look at each other, that has Klaus leaning so far forward he’s half ready to fall on his face. 

They’d all been aware of those women who’d had them all at once. They knew enough to know they existed, and where they might’ve been from, judging by the names Grace had bestowed upon them on their eleventh birthdays. They’d all spent long afternoons fantasizing about it, long nights dreaming about it, about the families they’d been born into, the mystery women without names and faces who’d had them all at once and then vanished into smoke, the mothers they certainly had, but never knew. 

Klaus, most of all, has wanted to meet his, has kept that secret dream alive in the back of his mind, when so many of the others have withered and died. He’d been more cunning about it, as he’d grown, knowing better after that backhand he took to the face at the dinner table when he was nine than to bring it up in front of anyone. But he wanted it, enough to brave breaking into Dad’s office and searching for information on his birth mother. He’d come up empty-handed, and received a beating for his trouble. 

In this world, at least, now it is obvious where their father had stored that information: far out of reach of those charges who would’ve known him well enough to know that they would be safer elsewhere, who would have taken the knowledge of a birth mother as encouragement to flee. 

“Ben,” Allison says, “What are you suggesting?”

“Their names are here. Addresses. We could…” His mouth opens around the words, but he can’t speak them; they might lose their power, might turn on them, as they so often do, and this is a situation far too delicate to risk invoking the wrath of the universe upon. 

He doesn’t need to. Everyone hears them, stirring up in their hearts. The great mystery of What Comes Next, after their banishment and after the Academy's rather abrupt second dissolution, had been brewing in the backs of their minds, but it's a mystery they have yet to even fully wrap their minds around, still smarting from the shock of their battle. Now, they don't even need to wonder, as it has been solved. They know exactly what their next step will be. 

Klaus breaks the silence, and the spell, finishing Ben’s sentence, and the thoughts of each and every one of his siblings: “Let’s go find them.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Writing fight scenes is... ugh. It pains me. 
> 
> So once more, as of this fic's conclusion I do want to reiterate that I very much expect that this info about the Sparrows will age horribly, but I mean... fuck it.
> 
> All in all I do feel very mixed about this fic and it's execution. I think it's due to so much of the action being concentrated here after several chapters of the characters sitting around and thinking about shit. It's a weird shift for me, but a necessary one.
> 
> At any rate, past this point, there's zero canon material I'm working with, aside from one revelation about Reginald, so we're moving from the Wild West into wild space. We're also in what technically constitutes Act 4 as of this chapter. It's real surreal that we're this close to the end already. 
> 
> Thanks so much for reading!
> 
> ______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
> 
> Coming up next: the siblings meet their makers.


End file.
